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COPYRIGKT DEPOSIT. 



A WORKING FAITH 



A WORKING FAITH 



By 
HARRIS FRANKLIN RALL, Ph. D., D. D. 

President and Professor of Systematic Theology 

The Iliff School of Theology 

Denver, Colorado 



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THE ABINGDON PRESS 

jftntt Slorft Cinctnnatt 






coptbight, 1914 
By Habbis Franklin Rall 



AUG 12 1914 

©CI,A376959 



(3ln (iHemortimt 



GEORGE BARKER STEVENS, OF YALE UNIVERSITY; 

MARTIN KAHLER, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HALLE-WITTENBERG; 

MAX REISCHLE, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HALLE- WITTENBERG, 

THREE FRIENDS AND FORMER TEACHERS 

OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 



PREFACE 

]y yTAN can have no greater treasure than a vital 
-*--■■ faith. Such a faith means courage and con- 
fidence for our tasks, purpose and unity for our 
Kfe, moral strength and inward peace, and that 
fellowship with the Highest which enriches life 
here and assures the life that is beyond. 

Such a faith is not a creed handed down from 
age to age, nor a system of theology worked out 
once for all. Every age brings new problems 
threatening its security. Every age brings also 
its advance of knowledge and its larger experi- 
ence. That is why such a faith needs to be con- 
stantly restated. That is especially true of our 
age. History and natural science have given us 
a new world. Can we hold the old faith in the 
new world? Every generation of thoughtful 
men, especially college men, has to face that ques- 
tion anew. That question these pages seek to an- 
swer. 

But that is not all. Our faith should be richer 
with every generation. We see that in the field 

7 



8 PREFACE 

of conduct to-day, in personal ethics, and in social 

morality. 

"New occasions teach new duties; 
Time makes ancient good uncouth." i 

That is just as true of religious thought. We are 
in the midst of a revival of faith. It is a deep 
conviction that nature is more than a machine, that 
life is more than material goods, that God is, and 
that the heart of life is the personal and spiritual. 
And what is more, men are seeing God and life 
through the eyes of Jesus Christ. But all this is 
no mere return to tradition. We must do our re- 
ligious thinking in the new world, with all of sci- 
ence and all the better knowledge of history that 
we have gained. The new faith should be richer, 
more vital, than any statement of the past. 

Four words suggest this change and enrichment : 
natural science, for God to-day is more wonderful 
and nearer because of the world that science has 
revealed; historical science, for it has made us 
know how rich Christianity is in its long history, 
and how wonderful has been the whole story of 
God's training of our race; the ethical emphasis, 
for it has been driving out the institutional and 

» Lowell: The Present Crisis. 



PREFACE 9 

ceremonial and making religion vital and appeal- 
ing; the social emphasis, for it has taken religion 
from the clouds and made it live among men. 

These pages seek to give such a restatement of 
faith. They seek to meet the difficulties which 
assail a thoughtful man to-day ; to show that mod- 
ern thought has brought not simply question, but 
enrichment; to set forth that faith in the speech 
of to-day; and to set it forth as a working faith, 
that will meet the needs of real life and grow 
stronger through its experiences. 

There are four classes of readers to whom these 
words are directed. There are the students of our 
colleges, who need such a faith not only for their 
own life, but that they may render the full service 
for which society looks to them, the leadership 
which men of faith can give. There are the leaders 
of the young and of thoughtful folks that are 
older, pastors and teachers who must meet ques- 
tions and doubts, and who want to bring to their 
students or hearers not only safe guidance, but a 
rich and appeahng faith as a summons to life. 
There are the folks outside the Church, or apart 
from the stream of religious progress, who think 
lightly of religion and the Church because they 



10 PREFACE 

do not know these as they are to-day. Finally, 
there is the growing number of men and women 
who want such a vital faith for themselves, a faith 
that shall interpret the changes that they see, that 
shall speak their convictions, and that shall meet 
the needs of the individual life and the demands 
of the larger social life as it exists to-day. 

The substance of these pages has been given 
in the form of addresses to college students at 
summer conferences and at various institutions of 
learning. The style of direct address has been 
only partly modified. The argument has been 
put in simple and non-technical form. Readers 
to whom any of these problems are new, might 
find it easier and more interesting to begin with 
chapter three and leave the first two chapters to 
the end. HARRIS FRANKLIN RALL 



The Iliff School of Theology, 
Denver, Colorado, 



CONTENTS 
I 

God In His Wobld 17 

A "working faith," one that can face the facts and 
meet the needs of life. 

The age just passed one of science, criticism, and in- 
creased material power; these have not met spiritual 
needs or moral weakness. The return to faith. 

The Objections. 

From Evolution: No need of God to explain the 
world. Evolution as science to be distinguished from 
evolution as philosophy. Can not explain source or 
end of the world. 

From Naturalism: No place for God in the world. 
The wrong conception of the supernatural with both 
theologians and scientists; the result. Naturalism leaves 
out life's biggest facts: the personal and ideal. If the 
personal be real, then it is first and key to all the rest. 

From Agnosticism: We can not know God. What is 
knowing? The venture of faith; the justification through 
life; the application to religion. The right to believe. 

God as Presence. The meaning of law. The Presence 
in the life of man, in nature. 

God as Purpose. The bearing upon our social faith. 

God as Person. The failure in some modern cults. 
Religion a personal relation. 

11 



12 CONTENTS 

II 

Is THE World Good? 59 

The great objection to faith: the world of evil. Four 
facts: nature as cruel, as unmoral, as immoral, and fact 
of sin. 

Our fault, the failure to see life whole and at its 
highest. Three principles to be used. 

The Ethical Principle: the test of the good is not 
material ease but moral life. 

The world as a place for righteousness, not righteous- 
ness as finished external order but as moral achieve- 
ment. 

The world as place for faith. Its contradictions chal- 
lenge faith, call it forth, give faith its insight. 

The world as a place for love. Love as the final good. 
Its relation to suffering and sorrow. 

The Social Principle: to understand the world we 
must look at the social whole, not merely the individual. 

The social fact and its problem. Social suffering in- 
cident to social good, the source of social passion and 
power. 

The Principle of Development: we must judge life 
by its issue, not by the moment. A world in the making. 

As to the individual, apparent failure. 

As to the race. The tuition of law. Life in a world 
that is being made. 

The bearing on moral evil. Character only through 
development, with imperfection and failure as inevitable. 
God's interest is not simply suppression of sin, but 
achievement of righteousness. 

The final solution is by faith. Faith makes us sure 
of God, shows us evil overcome in our own life and in 
the world. 



CONTENTS 13 

III 

The Bible and Faith 87 

The old conception and the new. 

The Traditional View: a real experience, hut a faulty 
theory; the faulty elements: the Bible as text-book, in- 
spiration as mechanical, human and divine considered 
as excluding each other, no room for real growth. 

The Modern View: a human book, but one in which 
we meet God; a great history in which God is moving; 
a nation through which God wrought; first the redemp- 
tive movement and the life, then the writings. 

The Historical Revelation in its character: it will be 
gradual, personal, redemptive; the Bible as its product 
and monument; the result, a Bible that is vital, that 
shows variety and difference and progress. 

The Meaning of the Book: the book of God, God as 
its ruling passion and its moving spirit; the book of 
man, revealing man, meeting the needs of all men. 

The Authority of the Bible. 

IV 

Christ and Faith 117 

The theme: not what doctrine of Christ must we 
hold, but what help to faith does He give. 

Christ and the Question of God. Jesus brings us 
God as Father. Jesus reveals the Father by His spirit 
and life. The idea of God thus given has determined 
our ideal of religion. The religion of Jesus universal, 
spiritual, ethical, redemptive. 



14 CONTENTS 

Christ and the Ideal of Life. Jesus gives not laws, 
but an ideal; the ideal set forth in His life. 

His life: its purity, yet not negative; its universality 
and completeness; its supremacy. 

Jesus changes morality from mere duty to passion. 
He shows it as the conquering power. 

Christ and the Question of Hope. The problem of 
power as man's great question. Jesus' spiritual mastery 
as a fact. He kindles the sense of need and of desire. 
He shows men God and gives them courage to trust. 

Jesus as Master of men and of nations, of the social 
life and conscience. "To whom shall we go?" 

The miracles of Jesus. The doctrine of His person. 



A Social Faith 157 

Our age as the social age; the social passion, the 
social insight, the social hope. The social movement in 
the Church, its place in religion. 

The Social Ideas of Christianity. 

The Kingdom of God a social hope. 

The idea of God: His presence in the world; the 
holiness which saves instead of separating; the meaning 
of His righteousness. 

The idea of man: the sacredness of humanity; the 
radicalism of Jesus; the human test of state, of in- 
dustry. 

The idea of righteousness: its meaning with the 
prophets; its social meaning; as a present-day issue; 
righteousness and the new democracy. 



CONTENTS 15 

The Social Spirit of Christianity. 

The spirit of purity: its war against immorality. 

The spirit of love: the new fellowship; socializing 
the man. 

The spirit of service. 

The Social Power of Christianity: the social spirit 
as creative force. 

A Social Creed. 

VI 

The Place of the Church 195 

Modern indifference to the Church and its ground. 
False conceptions of the Church, and true. The Church 
a vital part of Christianity. 

The Church and Its Message. 

Ideas are the forces of history. The need of the 
message for society, for the individual. The message 
found in the Church. The Church and the Bible. 

The Church as Fellowship. 

Fellowship and the highest life; the need of the in- 
dividual; the meaning for democracy; for the perpetu- 
ation of faith. The comprehensive fellowship. 

The Church and Worship. 

The permanence of worship and its need; its spirit- 
ual power. 

The Church at Work. 

The relation to the Kingdom; the Church as instru- 
ment; the spirit of service to-day; social service of the 
Church, direct and indirect. 

The Coming Church. Authority and unity: in the 
past institutional and external, in the future moral and 
spiritual. 



16 CONTENTS 

VII 

A Man's Life ^29 

The Life with God — Fellowship. 

As seen in the Old Testament, with Jesus. 

The problem: how can sinful man have fellowship 
with the righteous God? God receives us as sons, that 
He may make us such. The life of sonship: humility, 
trust, fear, obedience, prayer. The right to pray; the 
nature of prayer. 

Saintship — the Making of a Man. 

Saintship as consecration and character. Fellowship 
as a transforming power, God's gift; as a task, the 
moral demand. 

Society — the Life with Men. 

The social nature of man's life, its social training, 
its social task, and end. 

Stewardship — Life as Trust and Task. 

Life as co-operation with God. 

The attitude toward the world. Jesus on the fear 
of the world and the love of the world. The world as 
means: the school of play, of work. 

The social meaning of stewardship: the stewardship 
of business; the spending of income; the business of 
giving; the stewardship of life. Choosing a life-work: 
What and where. 



CHAPTER I 
GOD IN HIS WORLD 



««nnHIS is a healthy, a practical, a working faith. 
A First, that a man's business is to do the will of 
God. Second, that God takes upon Himself the care of 
that man. Third, and therefore, that a man ought never 
to be afraid of anything." 

George MacDonald in Robert Falconer. 

"There has never been a day when so many men were 
seeking for firm convictions of their own. For a con- 
viction that is really conviction, for a faith that can 
really be believed, our age is still ready to hazard life 
itself. Human nature is not so low that it can rest in 
pleasure and the service of self. Men are seeking some 
conviction as to the meaning of life. Only, it must be 
a real faith. And here lies the task of the Church, its 
old task and its new, to bring to the men of to-day a 
living God and eternal life." 

Adolf Haenack, Reden und Aufsatze, II, 65. 



Chapter I 
GOD IN HIS WORLD 

A Working Faith 

WE are to consider in these pages "A Working 
Faith." A faith does not mean a system of 
doctrine or a philosophy. It is something vital 
and practical. We may define it as a conviction 
concerning a higher Power who can give meaning 
to our life, to whom we look for help and whom 
we obey. The faith which we shall consider here 
is a Christian faith, because its inspiration, its 
ideal, and its certainty come through Jesus Christ. 
We shall not go back, however, to ask what all the 
doctrines are that have been held by the Church 
or that are contained in the Bible. Our aim is 
rather personal and practical. We are looking for 
something upon which to build our life. We call 
it a working faith for this reason: it must meet 
the needs of our life and stand the test of living 
itself. And it must meet a second test, not only 
that of the world of action, but of the world of 

19 



20 A WORKING FAITH 

truth. We want no faith that must be walled 
off from the rest of our thinking. We believe with 
Emerson: "The Religion that is afraid of science 
dishonors God and commits suicide. It acknowl- 
edges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, 
that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's 
empire, but is not the immutable, universal law."^ 

Such a faith is not a task, but a gift. It is 
not a burden that weighs men down, but joy and 
peace and strength that girds for the task. It 
does not come to men and say, This is the minimum 
that you must believe ; rather it says, This is a life 
that you may have. Jesus did not go about talking 
of the "essentials," the doctrines which a man must 
hold to be a Christian; He proclaimed the good 
news, the God in whom men might trust and from 
whom they might have life. 

It is no wonder, then, that men are turning 
again to faith. Such a revival is with us now. It 
is true that men are not simply going back to the 
traditions of their fathers. That would bode ill 
for religion, for that which lives never simply 
moves backward. But the temper of men has 
changed. Henry Van Dyke wrote fifteen years 

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 21 

ago his "Gospel for an Age of Doubt." To-day 
we need "The Gospel for an Age of Desire." The 
spirit of desire is present where once there was at 
least a touch of self-sufficiency and scorn. Science 
is more modest to-day. She knows her limits, alike 
of knowledge and of power, better than two gen- 
erations ago. What our present condition is will 
become more clear if we turn for awhile to the 
age from which we are emerging. 

The Passing Age 

The past age has been one of science. Never 
have the boundaries of knowledge been so rapidly 
extended. Molecule and atom and electron, we 
have probed for the last element of matter. We 
have searched the heavens and found infinite 
worlds beyond the worlds that we have seen, and 
we have weighed them in our balances and deter- 
mined their composition. We have searched the 
past and compelled it to give up its secrets. No 
problem has been considered insoluble. Men 
stopped before the last and hardest, and simply 
said. To-morrow. That overconfidence is gone. 
We know to-day that the tools of science have 
brought us no nearer the answer to the final ques- 



22 A WORKING FAITH 

tions of life than we stood a hundred years ago. 
All our wide knowledge can give no answer to 
Job's ancient cry, "Oh that I knew where I might 
find Him!" 

It has been an age of criticism. Men were in 
earnest. They wanted what was real. No tradi- 
tion was so hoary, no dogma so long established, 
as to escape the test. Men wanted all the facts, 
and they wanted nothing else. But the age which 
insisted upon the real left the most real to one 
side. They would deal only with what they could 
measure and weigh. They knew the dust on their 
balances, but they knew not what was in man. 
They asked for facts, and then shut their eyes 
to the great facts which make for all men, even 
scientists, the meaning and power of life. Love 
and truth, right and wrong, man and God, these 
were outside their ken. It was science grown un- 
scientific. To-day we are making room for the 
great facts of our moral and religious nature, for 
the whole realm of the ideal. 

It has been an age of power, of material expan- 
sion and conquests. The day of iron and steam 
has made a new industrial world. We have en- 

* Job 23: 3. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 23 

slaved the forces of earth and sea and sky, and 
harnessed them to our machines. The single man 
at the machine can do the work of a hundred men 
of three generations since. And so there has been 
a material development for which there is no par- 
allel in history. The world's wealth to-day is in- 
comparably greater than in any previous age. A 
generation ago nations gloried in that power and 
boasted of their advance. We are far from con- 
fident to-day. The material development has mul- 
tiplied problems for us instead of solving them. 
Our increased material power seems only to have 
made our moral weakness the more plain. With 
all our wealth, there was never more bitter or wide- 
spread social discontent. We have wealth that is 
selfish and insolent, and poverty that is the more 
bitter because it is needless. And disease and vice 
and political corruption are still with us. The 
age of boastful power has not had power enough 
to solve these questions. Nor has it served our 
need to add science to our wealth. Only moral 
and religious forces may meet these needs, and 
only a new age of faith can supply these forces. 
The experience of the past age has not been 
without its fruitage, even for faith. We shall not 



24 A WORKING FAITH 

go back to the beliefs of an earlier age. We must 
move on to something higher and richer, and the 
age of science and criticism and material develop- 
ment will help us. The science and criticism, as 
we shall see, have helped to purge out old errors 
and narrow views. They have driven us to a larger 
conception of religion. And even our material 
progress and social problems have helped to force 
religion down from the clouds of theory and senti- 
ment and back from the dreams of another world, 
to face her real task of establishing a kingdom of 
righteousness upon earth. 

Can I Believe in God 

The first article of any faith is God. Because 
ours is a working faith, we shall not talk of the 
being of God in itself, but shall ask rather whether 
we can believe in such a God, and what He means 
for our life and for this world. But some one 
may interpose right here: "What we want is some- 
thing practical, and you are falling back already 
into dogma. It is not a theory that this world 
needs, but a life." 

Do we need a God for our working faith? Is 
it not enough to say, I believe in the good will 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 25 

and the kind heart? A little girl was wont to 
play church, and the play went something like 
this: "Peoples, stand up. Peoples, sing. Peoples, 
sit down." And the sermon that followed was 
always the same, "Peoples, be good." There are 
many sermons that are summed up in that word, 
but this life of ours needs far more than that. It 
is not enough to say, "Peoples, be good." It is 
not enough that we shall try to be good ourselves. 
Is there no power to give us victory in our own 
lives.'* And what of the world fight against the 
forces of evil, does the issue hang upon your little 
effort and mine.'* What is on the throne of this 
universe.'* Are the stars fighting in their courses 
against Sisera? Is our little kindness just a help- 
less eddy in a great world current that, cruel and 
resistless, sweeps us all on at last to the same 
oblivion.? Or is our kindness begotten of some 
great heart of kindness that rules this world.'* 

But here is another objection that is raised. 
Though the self-confident unbelief of an earlier 
day is largely gone, the voice of doubt is not yet 
stilled, and it tells us that we can not believe in a 
God in this world. In a popular way these objec- 
tions may be put in fourfold form: (1) There is 



26 A WORKING FAITH 

no need of God for this world. The world is 
simply a gradual evolution to be explained by the 
forces that are resident in it. (2) There is no 
room for God in the world. The world is simply 
a great mechanical order, where everything hap- 
pens according to law. (3) We can not know God 
if there be one. (4) The world is full of evil; 
we can not believe that a good God rules it. 

There are two reasons why we may well take 
up these questions with care. We have already 
agreed that our working faith is not to be shut 
up in a separate compartment and kept from all 
disturbing facts. It must live in the whole world 
of our thought, and it must be strong enough to 
bear the burden of life's chief interest which we 
are placing upon it. Further, we shall find that 
these great questions, and the theories of science 
which lie back of some of them, so far from shut- 
ting us off from faith, may help to free us from 
casual error and drive us to deeper and larger 
truth. It need not be added that these great ques- 
tions can not be taken up in detail. We want to 
face the issue fairly, but consider it only so far as 
it bears upon our question. The last of the prob- 
lems will be considered in the next chapter. The 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 27 

first three, which we may call the objections of 
evolutionism, naturalism, and agnosticism, we will 
consider now. 

The Objection prom Evolution 

We turn, then, to the objection made in the name 
of evolution. The position taken is somewhat like 
this: "The old explanation of the world was that 
of creation. Now, however, we know that the 
world came to be gradually, by the forces of nature 
herself working from within, and not by a creative 
power from without. These inner forces and these 
laws explain all things. There is no need whatever 
to go outside and suppose a creating God." 

The one point that must be made absolutely 
clear here is the distinction between evolution as 
a working theory of science and evolution as a phi- 
losophy. The task of science is simply to explain 
the order and nature of happenings in the world. 
It tells how things behave. It is not the task of 
science to tell what is the ultimate nature of things 
or their final meaning. That belongs to phi- 
losophy. Scientific evolution is the attempt to ex- 
plain how the world of nature as we know it came 
to be. It lays down two main principles : first, the 



28 A WORKING FAITH 

world of to-day came to be gradually instead of 
by great leaps or at some single moment; second, 
it came in some way by forces working within, 
not imposed from without. 

In this broad sense we are all evolutionists to-day. 
We are all trying to understand things as they 
are by studying the history of how they became. 
We apply this to society and religion just as we 
do to geology and biology. Of course, even in 
science evolution is not a solution, but a working 
tool. Darwin's case affords a good illustration of 
the distinction. He showed men that evolution was 
the principle to be used for studying the develop- 
ment of organic forms. Scientists all use this tool 
which he put into their hands. But his solution 
of the problem, his particular theory of evolution, 
is still subject for difference of opinion. 

It was not unnatural that men felt at first that 
the idea of evolution was an answer to all questions 
of life. Its good standing in science was used as 
a cloak to cover all sorts of philosophical shabbi- 
ness and emptiness. Two simple questions will 
show the failure of evolutionism as a philosophy. 
First, what is the ultimate origin of this world of 
life that we see.*^ Second, what is its meaning and 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 29 

goal? Science does not need to answer these ques- 
tions, philosophy must. 

Take the question of origin. Darwin closes his 
"Origin of Species" with these words: "There is 
a grandeur in this view of life, with its several 
powers, having been originally breathed by the 
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, 
while this planet has gone circling on according 
to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a be- 
ginning endless forms most beautiful and most 
wonderful have been and are being evolved." 
Tyndall declares that he must "cross the boundary 
of the experimental evidence, and discern in matter 
. . . the promise and potency of all terrestrial 
life."^ But these first forms of life of Darwin, 
or this primitive fire mist of Tyndall which has the 
"promise and potency" of all life, are not all that 
is necessary for the evolutionist. You can not 
have evolution without variation. Where does it 
come from? To call it fortuitous is to beg the 
question. That would be a denial of the reign 
of law at the beginning by those who insist upon 
it so strenuously later on. Here is the fact of he- 
redity that is just as necessary to start up evolu- 

*Fragments of Science, II, 191. 



30 A WORKING FAITH 

tionary housekeeping. And with these granted 
we might as well concede the rest. That is nothing 
less than this marvelous world-all itself, not as an 
inert and undifferentiated mass, but charged with 
power and informed by a marvelous complex of 
law and order. All this we grant freely to scien- 
tists like Darwin and Tyndall, but not to the 
philosopher who calls himself evolutionist. The 
philosopher must explain. Where does he get fire 
mist and forces and laws, heredity and variation 
and all the rest.'* Until then we can not agree that 
he has a sufficient explanation of the world. Un- 
til that time we will simply say that modern science 
with its evolution has not ruled out God, but has 
given us a more wonderful conception of His work- 
ing. 

In the same way we must say that we can not 
accept evolutionism as a theory of the world until 
it can also explain the meaning and the goal of 
the world. Here are questions that men asked 
when the world was young. They will ponder 
them when Laplace and Darwin shall lie as far 
back for human thought as Saracen science or 
Babylonian astronomy to-day. For the end of 
things claims not only our deepest interest as men. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 31 

but alone reveals the true nature of being. It is 
not enough to study the history of the man. It 
is not enough to discourse about phylogenetic and 
ontogenetic series. We must study the man, the 
man at his highest, the end of the series. The 
real explanation of things lies at the end, not at 
the beginning. The key to the meaning of the 
world is not in nature, but in the Kingdom of God ; 
not in fire-mist and cell, but in that 

"far-off, divine event. 
Toward which the whole creation moves." * 

It is this last step that gives us the key by which 
we unlock the meaning of the first cause. 

The Objection from Naturalism 

The second objection is that of naturalism, of 
which, indeed, evolutionism is but a phase. The 
modern idea of nature is that of a constant devel- 
opment through inherent forces according to nat- 
ural laws. What we have is just a great machine 
moving according to inexorable law. The form is 
ever changing, but every change is absolutely ex- 
plained by what has gone before. The wheels move 
round. We have motion and change of position; 

* Tennyson, In Memoriam, conclusion. 



32 A WORKING FAITH 

that is all. Nothing old is lost, nothing new 
comes in. 

Before we question this new naturalism we must 
understand the old supernaturalism which was the 
popular orthodox theory of yesterday. The old 
theory was dualistic. It drew a line through the 
world. On the one side was the natural, on the 
other the supernatural; on the one the sacred, on 
the other the profane. The supernatural was the 
direct action of God. The natural was the ordi- 
nary course of the world. In the beginning God 
made the world; that was supernatural. Then 
He left it to go on its regular course; that was 
natural. Now and then, at special times and for 
special purposes. He reached down into the course 
of events to work a miracle, to inspire a prophecy, 
to dictate a sacred writing, to shape the history 
of Israel or the founding of Christianity. Other 
events were natural, other history was profane. 
The supernatural was used where the natural ex- 
planation gave out. It was this supernatural that 
was used to show the being of God. The super- 
natural became, in a sense, the unnatural, and God 
was shut up to one part of His world. 

We can see what happened. The growth of 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 33 

science extended the "natural" explanation, and 
every such extension seemed to cut away just so 
much more of the foundation of faith. Astronomy 
showed a universe in the making — under natural 
law. The new geology showed us an earth that 
had come to be in similar manner. Darwin was 
only the last in this series. The forms of organic 
life were the last stronghold of the old static view. 
Were not the various species fixed and immutable.^ 
To cross them meant sterility. They could not 
have come out of anything else. They must, there- 
fore, have been due to an original act of creation. 
When Darwin and organic evolution came, and 
showed how these, too, were under the reign of 
law and had been brought forth by gradual evo- 
lution, it seemed as though God had been driven 
out from His last place in nature. 

But one step remained: the theory of the con- 
servation of energy and correlation of forces. 
Upon this theory men built up at last an absolute 
"naturalism," a real mechanical world-view. Noth- 
ing new can come into the world. What we see 
is simply forces changing their form. Life itself 
adds nothing, but simply takes and gives back 
again. The world is a big machine. It is a closed 

3 



34 A WORKING FAITH 

circuit; there i& no room for God in it, and no 
chance for God to break in. There is nothing but 
matter and motion, or matter and force. 

Now, the first error in all this is one of which 
both theologian and scientist were guilty. The 
former found God and the "supernatural" only 
wHere the "natural" failed. His world was a 
dualism with two kinds of explanation : nature and 
God, natural and supernatural. He must fight for 
some place where nature could not explain, some- 
thing that would prove God. The business of the 
scientist was to find the "natural" explanation, and 
his goal was a monism with nothing but nature 
and law. The fault of both was in the idea that 
God was absent where natural law was present. 
Both failed to see that orderly succession was 
God's way of working in His world, just as the 
progressive development was God's way of crea- 
tion. 

How theology has profited by this schooling of 
science we shall see later. Now we must look at 
the other side. Again, it is not the scientist, but 
the philosopher, that we are criticising. I might 
better say the dogmatist. The dogmatist is the 
man who is so in love with his theory that he shuts 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 35 

his eyes to the facts. Sometimes he is in the the- 
ological camp, but not always. It is dogmatism 
that we have here, not science, and the real scien- 
tific spirit must correct it. For the spirit of mod- 
em science is the desire to see things as they are, 
and to see all things. 

The trouble with naturalism is that it is un- 
scientific; it leaves out of account the most Teal 
and fundamental fact of life. That is the fact of 
personality. Our conception of reahty to-day is 
dynamic. Matter itself we conceive in terms of 
action, of force. It is not some dead, inert thing 
that is real only because you can not destroy it. 
Nothing is real except as it works, as it has power, 
life. But the most potent of aU reality is the per- 
sonal. What difference does it make that you can 
not weigh it or measure it.^ We see what it works. 
Look at human history. Just as soon as the per- 
sonal appears, we have new forces, new laws. The 
physical is the setting for these forces, condition- 
ing them, used by them. But the heart of history 
is the personal, and there lies its motive power. 
One name is enough to prove it. Jesus means more 
than a new dream in the hearts of men. Nineteen 
centuries are the continuous register of His su- 



36 A WORKING FAITH 

premacy over material forces as well as over the 
hearts of men. The changed boundaries of empire, 
the migrations of peoples, great voyages of dis- 
covery, new industries and new institutions all bear 
witness that this Person is the greatest fact and 
the greatest power in the world. 

The same is true in the common life of to-day. 
The crises in our life bring it out, whether for 
man or nation. Then we see that it is the per- 
sonal and ideal that rule, not the physical and 
natural. The highest power with the men of the 
Titanic was not physical. It was our fine personal 
ideals of loyalty, courage, duty, self-sacrifice. 
These words do not stand for anything that you 
can weigh or measure. You can not set them forth 
in natural law. If they are real, the scheme of 
naturalism breaks down. If naturalism be right, 
then such words are the breath of fools. If the 
only power be physical, if the only standard be 
the measure of force, what folly to save weak 
women and children, and let the strength and skill 
of manhood go down! But the world saw in the 
deeds of that hour not the delusion of a moment, 
but the finest fruitage of the spirit of our race. 
The power that could move men to such deeds. 



COD IN HIS WORLD 37 

and then bow a whole world in homage before them, 
is the highest power that the world knows. 

Our social life to-day is showing this same power 
of the personal and ideal. It is easy enough to 
discern the material forces that are at work in our 
modern political and industrial life. Too often 
our institutions have been merely the organs of 
selfishness and brute force. To-day they are un- 
dergoing a change. It is the human, the personal, 
the ideal that is coming to the fore. And these 
impalpable forces, breathing a love for man and a 
passion for righteousness, are overturning ancient 
institutions founded on force and greed, and 
shaping the order of a new age. Love, truth, right, 
home, country, God — ^these ideals are the final in- 
terests of our human life, and by these men live 
and die to-day. It is a petty and purblind scheme 
of things that can not find room for them. 

But that is not all. The personal demands not 
only room, but the first place. If it be real, it 
must be the highest and the key to all the rest. 
You must rule it out altogether, or you must put 
it first. It is supreme or it is nothing. The nat- 
uralistic thinker rarely has the courage to accept 
the logic of his position. He holds to his mechan- 



38 A WORKING FAITH 

ical scheme, but wants to smuggle in the ideal by 
some back door. He holds to a mechanical, natu- 
ralistic theory of evolution, but is always borrow- 
ing for it some garb of Christian thought to make 
it seem a hopeful and benevolent progress. He 
tries to rear a structure of justice and mutual 
regard on the sands of his brute struggle for ex- 
istence. We can not allow that in logic, we dare 
not build upon that for life. If the ideal is real 
at all, then it is the key to all the rest. And we 
hold with Professor James that it is the fruit and 
not the root that decides. Naturalism breaks down 
as a theory of life. The personal is real and is 
first. Not only is there room for God, but the 
deepest reality that we know points inevitably to 
Him. 

^ The Objection from Agnosticism 

There remains the objection of agnosticism: We 
can not know God, even if there be one. 

Now, there is a wholesome agnosticism which 
has a place in our faith. Faith does not mean 
omniscience. Theology has known too much in the 
past. We have speculated and dogmatized about 
first things and last things and the inner depths 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 39 

of the being of God, and we have been too much 
wont to identify faith with our declarations about 
these things. Faith is a personal trust. But it 
stiU remains that we must know God in order to 
trust Him. We do not ask to know the mysteries 
of His nature, but can we know Him as such a 
righteous and loving Being that we may commit 
our life to Him.'' 

WeU, what do you mean by knowing.? The 
people who make this objection usually mean one 
of two things. It is either knowledge through 
senses: what I can see and touch; more exactly, 
what I can measure and weigh and count. Or else 
it is logical knowledge: I know what I can demon- 
strate. I can prove to you, for example, that the 
sum of the squares on the two sides of a right- 
angled triangle is equal to the square on the hypot- 
enuse. 

I am quite ready to admit that by neither of 
these ways may we know God. We can not see 
Him, we can not demonstrate Him. But that is 
not the only way of knowing. Such a scheme 
again leaves out of account the deepest realities 
of life, life itself to begin with, and love and truth 
and right and trust and men and God. These, as 



40 A WORKING FAITH 

we have seen, are the actual forces in our life; 
they are the realities by which and for which men 
really live. This is the world of the personal. 
Our ambitions and hopes and joys and fears, all 
that gives purpose and power to our life centers 
here. That is as true of the philosopher and sci- 
entist as man, as it is of the rest of us. 

But we must go further. How are these men 
so sure that they can know "things" at all? I do 
not begin with any world of things. There is no 
way by which things can walk into me so that 
I can get hold of them immediately. All that I 
have is certain feelings and ideas, something that 
is going on in me. I begin with this personal world 
in me, not with any world of things. My first 
step as scientist or philosopher is an act of faith. 
I will trust these feelings as giving me some kind 
of reliable report of the world without. I will 
trust these processes of thought. And I venture 
to beheve that there are other beings who feel 
and think as I do. I believe this, though I can 
not see their thoughts or weigh their feelings or 
demonstrate that there is in them such a world 
as I know myself to be. Here, to begin with, we 
have self and truth and trust and other selves. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 41 

We have not seen them or demonstrated them. We 
have accepted them in order to live, and there is 
nothing more sure for us than these. Once started, 
we find that this faith works. But without such 
a working faith we can not move a step toward the 
knowledge of the world of things. 

This third way of knowing, then, is the most 
important. You may speak of intuition or what 
you will. It is not simply a theory of knowing, 
but a theory of what is real. The real things in 
life are the vital and personal, and we know these 
not by mere feeling or by mere intellect. We 
know them by daring and Hving. We must look 
at this further as it applies purely to the human 
before we ask the final question. Can we know the 
personal God.^^ How do I come to know any of 
the moral and spiritual elements of life, right and 
justice and love and good- will .f^ First comes a con- 
viction, an intuition, some sense that these are and 
are real. Then comes a venture, a surrender to 
these as that which is worth while. Then comes 
the knowledge that is given in the actual commerce 
of life, something far broader and richer than our 
first vision, at its best something big enough to 
satisfy our life and strong enough to hold it. 



42 A WORKING FAITH 

Here is friendship, love. I can not know the soul 
of another; there is no logic to prove affection. 
There is a conviction, a venture, an experience. 
We know only as we dare. All marriage is a 
noble adventure where it is not an ignoble bargain. 
The great treasures of life, truth and loyalty and 
love and the rest, are never known from the out- 
side. They can never be demonstrated to sight 
or reason. They belong to those who live. They 
are known only from within. 

But some one will say. Have I any right to 
venture like this upon the unseen and the undemon- 
strated? Back of that question is a worship of 
the merely logical, from which we are fortunately 
escaping. A man's first obligation is not a perfect 
logic, it is life. "Speculation is a luxury," as 
Bergson puts it, "while action is a necessity."^ 
Otherwise our ideal would be the centipede, who 
never moved because he had no sufficient reason for 
stirring any one of his hundred legs before the 
rest. The urgency of common life has kept us 
from such folly. We have acted without waiting 
for logic, and better knowledge has come with the 
acting. What is true there is true in the higher 

( Creative Evolution, p. 44. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 43 

realm. The treasures of life have come to those 

who dared. 

"Are there not, Festus, . . . 
Two points in the adventure of the diver: 
One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge; 
One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?" e 

All this, with equal right, we apply to our knowl- 
edge of God. He is the final justice and truth and 
right and love. He is the Person that is back of 
all personal. Why can He not speak to me as 
truly as my friend.^ You can not picture how.? 
No more can you with your friend. Waves of 
sound that smite the ear, waves of light that beat 
upon the eye, these and the touch of a hand are 
all that come to you, and all this is physical. How 
the soul of your friend comes into your soul, that 
is another thing. You can make no picture of 
that, but you are sure it is real. Has the Infinite 
Person less chance to speak to us than the finite 
friend? What happens between us and God is just 
what takes place when we know the ideal and per- 
sonal in human relations. Somehow in the heart 
of man there has been wrought the conviction of 
God. To that conviction men have given them- 
selves in lives of trust and obedience. It has up- 

• Browning, Paracelsus, I. 



U A WORKING FAITH 

held them in sorrow. It has given peace and joy, 
It has transformed the spirit of their hfe. And 
through the life the knowledge of God has grown, 
the God of righteous demand, the God of gracious 
help, the God of merciful pardon. 

The sin of our lives is not too great trust, but 
too little. The right to believe is not the right to 
be credulous. It is not the surrender of our right 
to think. It does not mean that we shall take un- 
thinking all that comes from past tradition or pres- 
ent authority. It is just the right to trust the 
highest that comes to us, to believe that truth and 
right and love are real, and that their name is God. 
There is a third great mainspring of life besides 
hunger and love, and that is faith. There is a 
third need besides food and a friend, and that is 
the Supreme Friend, God. The old theories as to 
the origin of religion are passing away. It did 
not begin as an institution devised by priests, nor 
as a theory to explain the world. Religion sprang 
out of the needs of man, and it lives because it 
meets those needs. The right of faith is the right 
to live^ to live our life at its highest and fullest. 
It is not only right, but duty. The highest that 
comes thus to us and works conviction ceases to be 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 45 

a mere appeal and becomes a challenge. What 
shall we do with it? Life is imperious. Whether 
it be the problem of hunger or of truth or of God, 
its first demand is not logic, but action. 

And what lies beyond the venture and the deed.^* 
The fine word of John's Gospel gives answer: "He 
that willeth to do His will shall know."^ We may 
not begin with the "I know," but out of the years 
in which we trust and obey and walk humbly with 
God there comes forth ever clearer and richer and 
stronger the knowledge of God. In that certainty 
men have gladly yielded life itself. And the lan- 
guage of such experience has always been, not I 
think, but, in Paul's word, "I know whom I have 
believed." ® 

What we have been considering so far has been 
not simply so many objections to be answered. We 
have been getting material for the question to 
which we now turn : What is this God whom we need 
for our working faith, and what is His relation to 
the world .f^ It is a threefold that we need: (1) We 
need a God who is in His world. (2) We need a 
God who is more than this world, who is working 
out His purpose in it. (3) We need a God with 

» John 7: 17. » 2 Tim. 1: 12. 



46 A WORKING FAITH 

whom we can have fellowship. These three we 
need: the presence, the purpose, the person. 

God as Peesence 

We need God as a Presence. Science has given 
us a new world. We look at the sky at night. 
Beyond us stretch the infinite spaces peopled by 
flaming worlds beside which our earth is but a 
grain of sand. We look back in time. It is no 
longer the story of the few thousand years that 
began with Eden and man. To what primeval mist 
must we go back in thought! What a tale of be- 
ing moving through endless cycles, before our world 
even comes into sight! Just as wonderful is the 
story of the world of the infinitely small, as we fol- 
low molecule and atom, ion and electron to the 
end of our knowledge. 

All this is giving us not a lesser place for God, 
but a larger vision of His being. There is no world 
apart from God. There is no life that is not in 
Him. The old idea is gone of a finished and inert 
world which has some kind of being outside of the 
God who made it. The atom, which once marked 
for science the last indivisible element, is now found 
to be only a world beyond the world that we knew 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 47 

before, with whirling electrons moving in their 
orbits. And who knows what we shall find the 
electron to be? Our new idea of the world is dy- 
namic. And all that vibrant power is one, and that 
oneness is in God. In the same way the thought 
of development has given us a truer and more in- 
timate idea of God in His world. The idea of 
creation is not lost. As we have already seen, evo- 
lution is the name for a method, and not the answer 
to our question as to cause or meaning. We still 
say, "In the beginning God ;" and we declare over 
against the world as the only answer to its riddle, 
"God created the heavens and the earth." ^ But 
how different our picture is ! The world is in the 
making. Not six days, but endless ages give the 
story of its creation. And God does not stand out- 
side the world as its carpenter, but moves in it as 
its shaping and informing life. "Of Him and 
through Him and unto Him are all things." ^^ The 
whirling electron infinitely small moves in Him. 
The circling worlds are His deed. The prayer 
that rises in us is the gift of His life. This is 
the new world that we can only understand by the 
doctrine of His presence. 

»Geii. 1: 1. "Rom. 11: 36. 



48 A WORKING FAITH 

"Earth's crammed with heaven. 
And every common bush aflame with God." n 

Day by day His presence creates this world anew. 
Day by day His shaping power leads it on toward 
its goal. 

The truth of this Presence helps us understand 
the meaning of natural law. Natural law is not 
a separate being or power that is above things 
and rules them. To speak of law in this way is 
neither science nor philosophy; it is only mythol- 
ogy, even though we dress it in modem terms. 
Laws are the observed ways in which things behave. 
So science must say, and it can say no more. For 
us, however, laws are simply the thoughts of God 
expressed in His world. We hear a great deal 
about the reign of law and the uniformity of na- 
ture. And men have thought of this great truth 
as a sort of cast-iron mold which shuts in things 
and men and God. What it really means is that 
God is trustworthy. The heart of the world is 
order, and not chance. God will not do one thing 
to-day and another to-morrow. He will be true to 
Himself. Men may build their knowledge and 
their lives upon that. "Seedtime and harvest, and 

»> Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, VII. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 49 

cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day 
and night shall not cease." ^^ But to use such a 
thought against God's free action in His world, 
against God's guidance of nations or answer to 
man's prayer, against providence or even miracle, 
that is unwarranted. The order of nature is God's 
self-consistent way of action which reveals His 
trustworthiness. Back of that order and that way 
is His great purpose for men. It is ours with 
open mind and waiting heart to look for what God 
will do, not to determine what God will not or can 
not do. That is neither the spirit of faith nor the 
province of science. 

The supreme presence of God is in the life of 
men. What that means we shall see more fully 
later. Here it is simply necessary to protest 
against that old dualism which set the human over 
against the divine as something foreign to it, which 
divided the sacred from the profane, and set off 
for God only one little part of His world as holy. 
To-day we see His presence in all the life of men 
and in all history. Not all lives, it is true, have 
opened to His Spirit, not all nations have yielded 
themselves to His guidance. But if Jesus could 

"Gen. 8: 22. 
4 



60 A WORKING FAITH 

say that not one sparrow fell without His Father, 
how much more is that true of men and nations? 
Even the Old Testament had caught that vision. 
"Thus saith Jehovah to His anointed, to Cyrus, 
whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations 
before Him."^* "Blessed be Egypt My people, 
and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel Mine 
inheritance." "Have I not brought up Israel 
out of the land of Egypt, and the PhiHstines from 
Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?"^* So Amos 
speaks, and Isaiah, and the great unknown prophet. 
So we speak to-day: There is no life apart from 
God, no star whose orbit is beyond His ken, no 
nation that is without His presence. 

What a new vision of God and the world this 
gives us! Evolution is no blind struggle, but the 
patience of God working through the ages and 
slowly filling the world with His larger life as He 
leads it up in its course. Nature has a deeper 
beauty because of the glory of the great Spirit who 
is behind it. History is not a tangle, but a great 
march. We catch the inner meaning of it all and 
say: 

"Here is the finger of God, a flash of the wiU 
that can."'' 

"Isa. 45: 1 "Amos 9: 7. » Browning, Abt Vogler. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 51 

For every man there are these two ways of looking 
at life, that of science and that of faith. The one 
looks at the outward form of life, the other seeks 
for its inner meaning. The one seeks to describe 
its order, the other its goal. The one seeks to link 
all happenings in cause and effect, the other to find 
the life that flows through it all. And it is the same 
world, without self-contradiction, that shows these 
two sides. He alone is wrong who says there is 
but one side. He is rich who finds this inner pres- 
ence when other men can only say nature, man, 
evolution, law. 

"A fire mist and a planet, 

A crystal and a cell; 
A jellyfish and a saurian, 

And caves where the cavemen dwell; 
Then a sense of law and beauty. 

And a face turned from the clod — 
Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God. 

**A haze on the far horizon. 

The infinite, tender sky. 
The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields. 

And the wild geese sailing high — 
And all over upland and lowland 

The charm of the goldenrod — 
Some of us call it Autumn, 

And others call it God. 



52 A WORKING FAITH 

"Like the tides on a crescent sea beach. 

When the moon is new and thin, 
Into our hearts high yearnings 

Come welling and surging in — 
Come from the mystic ocean. 

Whose rim no foot has trod — 
Some of us call it Longing, 

And others call it God. 

"A picket frozen on duty — 

A mother starved for her brood — 
Socrates drinking the hemlock. 

And Jesus on the rood; 
And millions who, humble and nameless, 

The straight, hard pathway trod — 
Some call it Consecration, 

And others call it God." le 

God as Purpose 

In the second place, we need God in His world 
as a Purpose, as a power greater than the world 
that is here working out His ends. The thought 
of God's presence we call immanence, the thought 
that God is greater than the world we call His 
transcendence. Both of these we must have for our 
Working faith. It is not enough to have the Pres- 
ence in all things. What does that Presence mean? 
Has it a purpose for us.? Is there power that will 
carry out that purpose .f* There is a lot of shallow 

»«W. H. Carruth. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 53 

optimism in our thinking to-day. Some of it is 
connected with the word evolution. It is so easy 
to assume that evolution means progress, that there 
is a sort of natural drift to the higher and better. 
What the natural drift is we may know pretty well 
by studying ourselves. The higher with us comes 
only with clear purpose and resolute will. The 
natural drift is in the line of selfishness and lazi- 
ness and too often evil passion. And as to nature, 
the men of science know better than that. They 
know that nature simply means the long struggle 
of the ages in which the weaker has gone down. 
True there is order in nature. So is there in the 
prize-ring. But the order of the prize-ring is 
simply meant to give the chance to the larger 
measure of cunning and brute strength. It is so 
in nature. Of love and mercy, of righteousness 
and goodness it says nothing and knows nothing. 
Nor is there much more than this when we come 
to history and look at the dreary succession of rise 
and fall, and try to find some thread of order in 
the awful tangle. 

Our working faith declares that the Presence in 
this world means a purpose, and that back of that 
purpose is a power that is in the world, but greater 



54 A WORKING FAITH 

than the world. If this world has any meaning at 
all, it is because we can so believe. With that con- 
fidence we can look squarely at the story of the 
long ages and the hard struggle. We do not mind 
so much the long, hard road if we can be sure of 
the end. That is the meaning of this faith. I can 
not understand the way, but because God is there 
with His purpose for me and the world, I can be 
sure of the goal. 

"I go to prove my soul! 
I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first, 
I ask not: but . 

In some time, His good time, I shall arrive: 
He guides me and the bird. In His good time!"i7 

And it is not a goal for the single soul alone, but 
for this world : the goal which the Chi*istian Church 
expresses in the phrase, the Kingdom of God. The 
world is not a place where God puts men on trial, 
to receive at last to Himself those who remain true. 
It is the place where God is working now with men. 
That is the ground of our optimism. That is why 
we dare to talk of banishing disease and driving 
out poverty and overthrowing oppression. That 
is why we venture the last and most daring hope, 

" Browning, Paracelsus, I. 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 55 

that some time bitterness and hatred and selfishness 
shall yield and a new spirit of peace and truth and 
good-will shall rule all the life of men. We dare 
believe it because God is no mere permissive pres- 
ence in His world, but a great power that is slowly- 
working out that purpose of mercy which He re- 
vealed in Jesus Christ. 

It is our modem Christian thinking that has 
brought these last two ideas together, the thought 
of evolution and of Christ. We see to-day their 
fine congruity. Christ is for us the great revela- 
tion of God's purpose. He shows us what it is 
that God has in view for men. First of all, it is a 
purpose of mercy to lift men into fellowship with 
Himself. With that comes the other end, the 
social end if you will : God is establishing a fellow- 
ship, a brotherhood, a communion, in which men 
shall serve Him by their love and service for one 
another. At the same time Christ shows us by 
what forces this end is to be realized ; not by might 
that works from without, but by His own trans- 
forming spirit of holiness and love working within. 
The thought of evolution has given us a double 
aid. It has given us the forward look, showing 
us that we could see the meaning of things only 



56 A WORKING FAITH 

as we looked ahead. And it has shown us God's 
way of working. For just as the idea of law has 
made us see that God's way of working is by uni- 
form order, so the idea of evolution has shown us 
that God works His ends not by sudden catastrophe 
wrought from without, but by patient progress 
working from within. Evolution, which does not 
exclude great crises and epochs, tells us that God's 
way is that of patient development, whether He 
be making a world or growing a man or leading 
the race up to Himself. 

God as Person 

Our final need is this: the Presence must be a 

Person. It is not enough to know that God is in 

His world. Can we speak to Him? Does He 

know.? Does He care.? It is not enough to say, 

''Closer is He than breathing. 
Nearer than hands or feet." 

Tennyson's other word must be true, 

"Speak to Him, thou, for He hears. 
And Spirit with spirit can meet." is 

A beneficent world-order is not enough. "My soul 
thirsteth for God, for the living God: When shall 

» Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism 



GOD IN HIS WORLD 5T 

I come and appear before Him?"^^ "If I have 
but Thee, I ask for nothing in heaven or on 
earth." ^^ The final cry of man's heart is for God 
Himself. That personal fellowship is the heart of 
religion. "This is life eternal, that they might 
know Thee."^^ Such a fellowship man can have 
only if God be Person. 

We need this conviction that God is Person for 
the sake of our social faith. We come here to the 
issue that is back of all our social turmoil to-day. 
Which is first, persons or things? What shall 
govern our laws and institutions, mere power or 
the interests of men? Our social program to-day 
is putting the personal first. We have put down 
human slavery and political autocracy ; now we are 
putting down industrial autocracy, the right of 
money to rule because it stands for power as once 
kings and armies did. The personal is supreme 
to-day: men and women and children. How can 
we hold such a program for society if it does not 
rest upon a corresponding faith. And that faith 
is this : the ultimate reality of this world is personal. 
God is not mere power or wisdom or some indefinite 
spiritual being. God is Person, our Father; the 

"Psalm 42: 2. «» Psalm 73: 25, after Luther's Version. "John 17: 3. 



58 A WORKING FAITH 

world is made for persons, His children; and our 
social program will win because it has the God of 
the world on its side. 

It was Jesus' great deed to make this faith in 
a personal and present God live again in the hearts 
of men. There is a certain cycle of development 
through which religion seems to pass among men. 
It begins as a vision and a fellowship in the heart 
of some saint or prophet. It becomes a doctrine, 
a ritual, an institution. And these, which ought 
to express the life, often serve but to crush it out. 
Jesus came with the passion for God in His heart. 
Prayer was the breath of His soul. It was His 
meat and drink to do His Father's will. He 
brushed aside the meaningless forms and the end- 
less laws which summed up religion for the people. 
He showed men God, and then He taught them to 
say, "Our Father." That was the first Christian 
creed. 



CHAPTER II 
IS THE WORLD GOOD? 



<«T ET him, therefore, who would arrive at knowledge, 
-Li train his moral sense; let him act and conceive in 
accordance with the noble essence of his soul; and, as 
if of herself, nature will become open to him. Moral 
action is that great and only experiment in which all 
riddles of the most nmnifold appearances explain them- 
selves." 

NovALis, quoted 'by Henry Jones in Browning as a Philo- 
sophical and Religious Teacher, 210. 

"As sinners stand up in meeting and confess to the 
goodness of God, so one who is called aflSicted may rise 
up in gladness of conviction and testify to the goodness 
of life. The struggle which evil necessitates is one of 
the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, help- 
ful men and women. It lets us into the soul of things 
and teaches us that, although the world is full of suffer- 
ing, it is full also of the overcoming of it." 

Helen Keller, Optimism, 13, 17. 

"Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be. 

The last of life, for which the first was made: 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, 'A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be 
afraid!' " 

Robert Browning, RabM Ben Ezra. 



Chapter II 
IS THE WORLD GOOD? 

WE have left for a separate discussion that 
problem which a recent writer has called 
"The Great Objection." Materialism and natural- 
ism and agnosticism do not so much trouble the 
common man. But here is an objection that comes 
home to all, the hardest problem for our thinking 
as it is for our life. It is as old as Job's cry. Its 
echo comes to us from Gethsemane. It meets us in 
every hour of sorrow and in the chamber of sick- 
ness and death. How can we believe in a good God 
with such a world as this.^^ It is all very well for 
the children to sing, 

"The world is so full of a number of things, 
I am sure we should all he as happy as kings." i 

But the real world of our grown-up life is very 
different. How can we put goodness on the throne 
of the world and say that God is in all its life.^^ 
What we see is pain inseparable from life, sorrow 

1 Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verse. 

61 



62 A WORKING FAITH 

and sin everywhere; and no power seems to smite 
the evil or comfort and shield the good. Where 
is there in this world the goodness in which we be- 
lieve? Instead, as Professor James says: "Beauty 
and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death 
keep house together in indissoluble partnership; 
and there gradually steals over us, instead of the 
old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an 
awful power that neither loves nor hates, but rolls 
all things together meaningless to a common 
doom."" 

Here are four facts about the world that seem 
to belie our faith. First, nature is cruel. Life 
everywhere means suffering. Look at this child 
in mother-arms, her daughter, it may be. What 
may the mother look forward to for her.? Health 
and friends and a home of her own.^^ Yes, but 
sorrow, too, and pangs of motherhood, and anxious 
care for children, and loved ones called by death, 
and sickness and weakness of age, and then the 
curtain over it all. That is just the common lot. 
Second, nature seems to us unmoral. She knows 
no guilt or innocence. Flood and fire and storm 
overwhelm all alike. With her inexorable laws she 

*WiU.isan James, The Will to Believe, il. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 63 

seems like some great machine through which our 
helpless lives pass on their fixed course from birth 
to death. This is not cruelty, for that implies a 
purpose, and here the terrible fact seems to be 
just an unknowing, unfeeling indifference. In 
the third place, the world seems to us not simply 
unmoral, but immoral. Think of the injustice. 
The scourge smites good and ill alike. The chil- 
dren bear the sins of their fathers. Day by day 
we see the innocent and helpless sacrificed upon 
altars of lust and greed. And not only is there 
injustice, but apparently its forces actually make 
for evil. It does not meet the difficulty to philoso- 
phize about freedom of the will, or judgment ac- 
cording to light. Here is the question: What is 
the actual moral impact of this particular world 
in which a given child is bom ? Take the paganism 
of India, where religion and lust may be linked 
together, or the paganism of New York, where 
the child of the tenement may be cheated out of 
pure atmosphere for soul as well as body. What 
does such an environment mean? What of the 
heritage that comes from weak, debased parentage? 
It is hard enough for us to be good who have every 
favoring influence. What then of these, whom all 



64 A WORKING FAITH 

life seems to conspire to thrust on the downward 
way? And fourth, there is the fact of moral evil, 
the fact of sin. Where did it come from? How 
can it exist at all if God be holy and if God rules? 

In some ways the question is harder for us than 
for our fathers. We have the social vision to-day. 
We can not write our theology any longer from a 
comfortable, optimistic, middle-class point of view. 
We see too clearly the world of paganism abroad, 
the millions of India that go hungry to bed each 
night, the world of the poor, the underfed, the dis- 
eased of body and soul in our own land. We 
know too well what heredity means, what the awful 
handicap is of the child of weakened body, neurotic, 
degenerate from its birth. And we can no longer 
simply say: All this was caused by sin. Pain was 
a part of the world in long ages before man came. 
And for us to-day it adds to the problem, rather 
than settling it, to declare that the children suffer 
for the sins of the fathers. 

That is the problem. If we face the facts and 
search their meaning we may find not the loss of 
faith, but a vision into greater depths than we 
could otherwise reach. And whatever light we 
may gain in this dark place means far more than 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 65 

solving a philosopher's riddle. It means hope and 
strength and cheer for the common tasks and the 
heavy burdens of life. For our faith needs not 
only a God in the heavens, but a God whose rule of 
goodness is in the world. 

"This world's no blot for us, nor blank. 
It means intensely and means good; 
To find its meaning is our meat and drink." s 

There are three mistakes common in the discus- 
sion of this question that will need to be corrected, 
and these will give us the outline for our study. The 
first is the mistake of the low ideal. The second is 
the mistake of looking at the individual instead of 
the social whole. The third is that of looking at 
the moment instead of seeing life as a movement 
and regarding its final issue. Against these we set 
three principles: the moral principle, the social 
principle, and the principle of development. These 
three principles, to Tvhich we are giving more and 
more place in our thinking to-day, must help us 
here as in our other questions. 

The Ethical Principle 

Let us turn first to the ethical principle. Is the 
world good? What do you mean by "good?" 

» Browning, Fra Lippo Lipjn. 



66 A WORKING FAITH 

Right here is our first problem, and it is not that 
of a bad world, but of a bad ideal. The good that 
men think of in this question is too often a matter 
of pleasure and of freedom from struggle and 
pain. Our first need is not to minimize the struggle 
and the pain, but to hold up an ethical ideal of the 
good. Materialism as a philosophy is dead to-day ; 
materialism as an ethic is very much alive. That 
does not imply anything gross. But there is a 
growing horror of pain, and worship of comfort, 
and praise of material well-being. We need a new 
message of idealism, strong, virile, ethical. The 
good is more than comfort. Life itself is the su- 
preme good, life at its highest and richest. 

*' 'T is life whereof our nerves are scant. 
Life, not death, for which we pant; 
More life, and fuller, that I want." * 

Now, the Christian ideal of life as the supreme 
good includes certain elements. Let me put it in 
three words : righteousness, love, faith. There must 
be righteousness, based on man's own choice, the 
fruit of struggle, wrought out in conduct and 
character. There must be love, binding man to his 
fellow, blessing him that gives even more than 

« Tennyson, Two Voices. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 67 

him who receives. There must be faith, giving to 
hfe its final meaning, its final hope, and its highest 
fellowship, the fellowship with God. The world 
that does not make for love and faith and right- 
eousness is not a good world. 

Let us apply the test. No world can be good 
that does not make for righteousness. But is not 
this our first stumbling-block? The world is so 
full of unrighteousness, of injustice and wrong, 
of innocence reaping evil and guilt that goes un- 
scathed. How can a God of righteousness be rul- 
ing here? Now, there are two kinds of righteous- 
ness between which we might choose in framing our 
world. The first would be an inflexible world-order 
imposed from without. Penalty and award might 
follow openly at the moment of doing, or sin itself 
might be wholly excluded. Whatever such a world 
might be, it would not be a human world. There 
would be no chance in such a world for making 
men. It might be perfect on a lower plane, but it 
would never reach the highest. For the highest 
righteousness for a world is the second kind, not 
something finished, but something that is being 
wrought out ; not a perfect order handed down, but 
a life that men choose and love and live and die for. 



68 A WORKING FAITH 

"Then, welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 
Be our joys three-parts pain! 
Strive and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge 
the throe." 5 

What a world it is for this, for a righteousness 
that is to be built up in the character of men and 
in the life and institutions of the nations! It 
brings to man obstacle and struggle, but how can 
there be moral fiber without this? Power is help- 
less without resistance, as the engine without the 
friction of the rail, or the aeroplane without the 
resistant atmosphere. It brings to man a chal- 
lenge by its indifference or injustice. But that 
challenge is a moral opportunity, the call to love 
righteousness for its otvh sake. And its very faults 
and imperfections are but another opportunity. 
They do not show an evil world, but a world that 
is being made, in whose making God asks us to 
take part. 

Here is faith. It does not seem a good world 
for faith. We can not see God, and the hard world 
does not make it easy to believe that goodness rules. 
But is there not a misconception here? Faith is 
not mere assent to the fact of God. It is not a 

• Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 69 

sacrifice of the intellect. But neither is it a bare 
act of mind. It is the moral daring of the soul. 
It is the surrender of the soul to its ideal convic- 
tions. Faith is always the answer to a moral chal- 
enge. It is a choice between higher and loiter. 
That is why faith counts for so much, because it 
has this moral quality. A different world from ours 
would make faith not easier, but impossible. A 
world where reward and punishment stood plain 
beside each deed, a world where God stood visible 
with penalty and gift, would be a world for belief 
but not for faith. There would be no Job to cry, 
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him;"^ 
no psalmist to rejoice in poverty so long as God 
were but his portion; no glory of Gethsemane, "If 
it be possible . . . nevertheless, Thy will be 
done."^ We might have a race of servants, but 
no heroes, no sons. Struggle, question, doubt, these 
are not the enemies of faith, only indifference and 
the contentment with what is low and base. Tenny- 
son's word is true when he sings : 

"One indeed I knew 

Who touched a jarring lyre at first. 
But ever strove to make it true. 

« Job 18; 15. » Matt. 26: 39. 



70 A WORKING FAITH 

"Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds. 
At last he beat his music out. 
There lives more faith in honest doubt. 
Believe me, than in half our creeds." « 

And not merely the confidence of faith, but the 
insight of faith comes this way. What is the high- 
est reach in our thought of God? It is not His 
wisdom or might, His transcendence or philosoph- 
ical immanence. It is righteousness, not as an im- 
personal order, but as a flaming passion; love, not 
as general benevolence, but as redeeming self- 
sacrifice. How did man reach it? By revelation, 
you say. But every revelation is an experience. 
To whom has the experience come? Why, to the 
men who have loved and toiled and dared and suf- 
fered. An Amos flaming with passion at the op- 
pression of the poor, a Jeremiah with heart doubly 
torn by love for his people and the certainty of 
righteous judgment, a Paul making himself the 
servant of all, a Dante in exile, and a Bunyan in 
his jail — ^these are the men whose heart of love and 
sorrow and whose way of pain have showed them 
the heart of God. 

And it is a good world for love. It could not 
be a good world without this, for the final wealth 

8 In Memoriam, XCVI. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 71 

of life lies here. I know the long tale of strife 
and hatred, of that law of struggle which begins 
with "nature red in tooth and claw" ^ and ends with 
the war of nations and the fierce conflict of our com- 
petitive system. But has not all this speech hidden 
from us the deeper fact? Life is the great oppor- 
tunity for love. Here is the relation of man and 
woman. What a fruitage of sentiment and ideal 
and affection have sprung from this soil ! Look at 
those conditions of nature and life which have 
brought men together in widening circles of asso- 
ciation: family, clan, tribe, city, nation, world. 
See how the circle has deepened in widening. At 
first a bond of necessity, men standing together 
because they had to fight that way or fall, it has 
become purer and nobler. The fine flower of kin- 
ship, friendship, loyalty, patriotism, and at last 
world-brotherhood has come slowly this way. It 
is a good world that makes for these. 

But there is more here. The very struggle and 
pain and suff^ering are the fountain out of which 
the purest love and compassion have come forth. 
It is helpless childhood that has called out mother- 
love. Wrong and suff*ering, not comfort and 

9 In Memoriam, LVI. 



72 A WORKING FAITH 

plenty, have made men lovers of their race. I can 
imagine a world with no pain to summon sympathy, 
with no sorrow to kindle compassion, with no help- 
lessness to stir fine chivalry, no want to call forth 
service, no overwhelming danger to join a nation 
together or cement it in a baptism of blood, no 
great disaster to thrill a world with sympathy and 
show all men as kin, where each man stood self- 
sufficient and no want uttered its cry. There might 
be fewer clouds in such a world, but life would be 
unutterably poor. The great souls of our race, 
patriot and hero and lover and saint, would not 
be there. The purest strain in the lyric of our 
life would cease. The great scenes of sacrifice that 
filled our life with a purer purpose and a tide of 
compassion would be forever blotted out. I do not 
say that love will cease when pain is gone. Love 
will abide, but it was this hard road by which it 
came. And this makes the hard road richly worth 
the while. 

"For life, with all its yield of joy and woe. 

And hope and fear , 

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, 
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." lo 

w Browning, A Death in the Desert. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 73 

We need a new appraisal of pain and toil. Our 
danger lies not in atheism or any heresy; it is in 
the base materialism of life, shunning tasks, seek- 
ing ease. It is no mere chance that the high 
achievements of our race have none of them been 
wrought in tropical zone. Men have reached the 
heights when they have had to fight. And the 
highest of all has come where men have fought and 
borne pain, and so won victory for others. The 
world's greatest way of triumph was the road that 
led from a judgment hall with a crown of thorns 
to a hill that bore a cross. 

"The cry of man's anguish went up unto God: 

'Lord, take away pain — 
The shadow that darkens the world Thou hast made. 

The close-coiling chain 
That strangles the heart, the burden that weighs 

On the wings that would soar — 
Lord, take away pain from the world Thou hast made. 

That it love Thee the more!' 

"Then answered the Lord to the cry of His world: 

'Shall I take away pain 
And with it the power of the soul to endure. 

Made strong by the strain? 
Shall I take away pity, that knits heart to heart. 

And sacrifice high? 
Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire 

White brows to the sky? 



U A WORKING FAITH 

Shall I take away love, that redeems with a price 

And smiles at its loss? 
Can ye spare from your lives, that would climb unto 
Mine, 

The Christ on His cross?' " 

The Social Principle 

Consider, second, the social principle. We have 
not understood this world or seen its goodness be- 
cause we have looked only at the individual, and 
not at the social whole. Our theology is gaining 
because it is growing more social. But so far 
our chief advance has been in seeing social duty 
more clearly. We still need social insight. Here 
is the great social fact first of all. Nolens, volen.% 
we are all tied together. The world nowhere shows 
the bare individual of our traditional thought; 
always families, classes, races, nations. It is true 
that at last the soul must stand alone in the pres- 
ence of God. It is true that the final relationship 
of life here is that of man and God. But there 
is so much more than that. The vision of God 
comes through the life with men. The life with 
God is only lived out in this way. Even the life 
from God is expressed by the great apostle in social 
terms : righteousness and love and peace. And the 
Bible never in Old Testament or New expresses the 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 75 

final purpose of God in terms of the mere indi- 
vidual. Christianity knows only a social salvation. 
It is a kingdom, a brotherhood, a family, a new 
race. 

I know that the first glimpse of the social fact 
seems to make our problem harder. It is the es- 
sence of love that it individualizes, but God seems 
to mass us all together. Justice means fair play 
for the individual, but God does not seem to care 
for the single life. This man is ignorant and care- 
less; upon his neighbor falls the typhus scourge. 
This man is greedy, and in his darkened tenements 
the white plague slays the children of the poor. 
The city thinks only of fine boulevards and "big 
business," and from the unsanitary homes of its 
poor and the places of legalized vice the physical 
and moral plague spreads to high and low, to 
guilty and guiltless alike. This man sins, and the 
curse of his sin falls upon the pure woman to whom 
he is joined and the innocent children, blighted of 
body and soul, that come into a world that is not 
of their choosing. How can God be good when 
each reaps the harvest from the sin of all, when 
the single soul can never escape from the social 
web in which we are all caught.? 



76 A WORKING FAITH 

I will not minimize the social evils. But are 
these not the mere background and incident of the 
social good? The first lesson that a thinker on 
life must learn is the lesson of alternatives. We 
are always wanting character without struggle, 
love without pain, righteousness with no possibility 
of sin, the vision at the summit without the long 
climb. The principle applies here. I know that the 
social tie means all these ills, but it means the good 
without which life is a blank. When I have said 
home and friend and country, I have spoken the 
words whose want would make our world a waste. 
The stars might shine and the harvests come, but 
the heart of the world would be cold and dead and 
the light of its sun gone out. The meanest soul 
that suffers and loves is richer than he who walks 
his way prosperous and painless, but alone. Bind 
us together if need be. Let the mother suffer with 
the pain of her child and the children from the 
sins of their fathers. Let the pestilence which 
comes from the ignorance of the few smite guilty 
and innocent together. If only there may be a 
world of love and friendship and home and kindred 
and country. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 77 

But the social suffering is more than the inci- 
dental cost which we must pay for the sake of the 
higher good. It is the source of that power which 
must lead us on. The mere appeal to selfish inter- 
est has never inspired any great forward move- 
ment. We shall never wipe out brothel and saloon 
and slum by simply pointing out that their evil 
influences will reach our comfortable lives. We 
live our selfish and evil life and are ready to bear 
the consequence. And then some day we see that 
the consequence is not individual. Our sin is drag- 
ging the world of our brothers down. It is because 
of our selfish indifference that they can not rise. 
And then we look with new eyes on all this social 
misery. Our life is part of it. The hands of none 
of us are clean. There is not one but must cry: 
Peccavi! peccam! That is the tragic fact that 
God is using to prick the dull conscience of men. 
It is not useless, this suffering at which we stumble. 
Out of it is being born the new social conscience 
and social passion. These are what shall lead us 
to the new Kingdom. Aye, these are the very 
spirit of the new Kingdom. They breathe its 
sympathy, its brotherhood, its self-sacrificing love. 



78 A WORKING FAITH 

The Principle of Development 

Let us note, third, what the principle of develop- 
ment means as applied to our problem. Life is not 
a finished something. For the individual man and 
for the race it is in the making. No man can 
judge life rightly who simply studies a cross- 
section, no matter how minutely. Our question can 
not simply be, what is it.? — but, Tvhat is it becom- 
ing .^^ It is the issue that decides. 

Take the case of the individual life. To the 
man who sees only one day of pain and sorrow, 
life is a riddle, a tragedy. But the test of life is 
the fruit of life. The test of the world is not the 
pleasure that it yields us, but the kind of man that 
it makes out of us. We are here to be made men, 
and the hard way of the world is just the means 
for this making. And this principle of develop- 
ment, this thought of perspective, will help us with 
a harder problem, that of apparent failure. Here 
is the man that never had a fair chance in life. 
The evil of the world was not a school to train him. 
It was a force that overwhelmed him. Or here is 
the child of whom we spoke above, coming into the 
world corrupted in its very blood and borne upon 
by all the tides of evil. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 79 

I do not know how we shall find room for these 
lives and the good God together if we see only 
this world. I can not at all agree with Principal 
Fairbairn when he says, "Time should have within 
itself its own apology, and not require an appeal 
from itself to eternity." ^^ Only faith can ever 
settle this question, and faith is always saying. This 
is but part, "see all, nor be afraid." ^^ There is 
no answer here apart from the vision of the eternal, 
and the eternal means the enduring as well as the 
invisible. The true man says with Browning's 
scholar : 

"Leave now to dogs and apes! 
Man has Forever." ^^ 

With this eternal perspective, suffering is dwarfed. 
"Our light affliction is but for a moment."^* 
With this perspective, opportunity finds larger 
place. And even the problem of apparent fail- 
ure is not without its light. How can we 
measure the possibilities of God and life by the 
few years that we see, if the supreme meaning of 
life be the making of man? Do we not need a little 
more Christian agnosticism and a little more Chris- 
tian hopefulness for the life that seems to have 

" Philosophy of Religion. " Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra. 

"^ Orammarian's Funeral. "2 Cor. 4: 17. 



80 A WORKING FAITH 

failed? Ours is not time, but eternity. The goal 
that T^e have set is what counts, not the length of 
the course that we have run. 

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall 
exist, 
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty nor good nor 
power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the 
melodist 
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour." is 

But the largest meaning in this idea of develop- 
ment is seen when it is applied to the race. We 
stumble over the laws of nature. How cruel, how 
unfeeling these forces are in their working ! They 
do not ask whether we intended wrong before they 
overwhelm us. They join in the ruin of flood and 
fire the innocent and guilty alike. But that stem 
tuition has made the race diligent and careful, 
sober and responsible, men and not babes. We our- 
selves have tried to be kinder and have been more 
foolish. We kindergartenize our education, even 
in the college. We sentimentalize in our charity 
as in our correction. We must have every path 
pleasant. What we really need is a new sense of 
inexorable and stem authority, and a new spirit 

» Browning, Abt Vogler. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 81 

of rev^ence and obedience. Here is the law of 
heredity. If the day counts alone, what a tragic 
fact it is ! But we are making a race, and the end 
counts. Heredity is God's warning and God's help. 
What a Sisyphus task it would be without this, 
always the long climb for each new generation, as 
though others had never toiled before! Instead 
we stand to-day on the foundations of the past. 

One other thought comes with this idea of de- 
velopment. The world is imperfect, but it is a 
growing world. Do we want to live in any other.? 
Would any other be good? Here is a world in the 
making, and life itself as a share in the great task ! 
Is there any higher conception of life, any higher 
good than that ? We are sharing in God's continu- 
ous creation. Christianity says to every man: 
Come on, there is real fighting, real work in the 
world, and it is work that shall last. Our college 
professors need not worry about substitutes for 
war. War is the surest fact in our life. Wrong, 
injustice, oppression, poverty, sickness are far more 
than problems for our faith. They are the open 
doors of life. And we 

"Rejoice we are allied 

To that which doth provide 



82 A WORKING FAITH 

And not partake, effect and not receive! 
A spark disturbs our clod; 
Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, 
I must believe." 19 

And finally this principle of development throws 
light on the darkest problem, that of moral evil. 
We can see that sorrow and suffering are relative 
evils. We can understand how they might need 
to be if something higher were to come. But sin 
is absolutely evil. How can there be any place 
for it in God's world at all ? How can a good God 
ever have allowed it to enter His world or to live 
on.f* Here again it behooves us to be modest in 
saying what can and what can not be done. But 
so much is clear, the only moral character that we 
know or can conceive comes by growth, by develop- 
ment. That applies to moral insight as well as to 
moral deed and moral strength. It is what we see 
with every child. It is what took place with the 
race. So far as we can see, if there is to be moral 
life at all, if there are to be any beings of love and 
righteousness who can have fellowship with God, 
then that life must come this way. There will be 
ignorance and weakness and failure before strength 

»• Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra. 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 83 

and purity and clear moral vision and proved moral 
character can be. And if there is to be real moral 
character, then there must be growth from within. 
That means the man's own soul, groping, choosing, 
striving, falling, rising. There can be no moral 
life without freedom. If God wants machines. He 
can make them. If God wants servants. He can 
compel them. If God wants sons whose love and 
loyalty shall be real, then their free surrender / 
to Him involves the chance of their refusal as / 
well. 

Practically speaking, then, the idea of develop- 
ment makes it inevitable that there will be the sin 
of failure, and the idea of moral freedom that there 
will be the sin of positive transgression. But why 
should either of these involve any compromise with 
sin, or any contradiction in God's character .^^ 
Looking at sin from either point of view, we are 
sure of one thing. Sin is here only to be overcome. 
All the forces of God are summoned for its extir- 
pation. And the cross is the final measure of His 
opposition. 

But always we must remember one thing. The 
opposition! to sin is not the only element of God's 
loving holiness. Side by side is His regard for 



84 A WORKING FAITH 

righteousness and love. His holiness means the 
building up of righteousness, not simply the cast- 
ing out of sin. And His end will not be reached 
till a communion of men joined in righteousness 
and love shall be established in the earth. That is 
why His method with sin is not prevention on the 
one hand or destruction on the other. The cross 
measures His opposition, but it marks His method 
as well. That is the method of a loving and pa- 
tient tuition by which God is overcoming sin in the 
heart of humankind. 

If we will leave the logic of the philosopher and 
turn to the experiences of common life, it will not 
be hard to understand. This father is righteous. 
Shall he refuse to bring sons into the world because 
at least some sin will be inevitable in their life.'* 
And if the sin appears, shall he overcome it by cast- 
ing out his son, or by the patient upbuilding of a 
righteous life in him.'* And if the father loved 
God and his kind, which will show his greater de- 
votion to righteousness, to refuse to bring forth 
the sons that might some time do evil, or to train 
young men to live righteously and to establish 
righteousness in the world.'' 



IS THE WORLD GOOD? 85 

The Answer for Faith 

In its final solution the problem of evil is to be 
settled by faith. That is so with every question 
of religion. The final answer comes not to the 
logical mind, but to the obedient will. That an- 
swer comes to the man who trusts in God despite of 
ill, and it comes in three ways. 

First, \\ith the knowledge of God. This is not 
the knowledge of reason, but that personal knowl- 
edge which is religion. He who trusts thus in dark- 
ness and doubt and sorrow comes at last to know 
that Power 

"Which makes the darkness and the light, 
And dwells not in the light alone." i7 

God is, and God is good: that conviction comes to 
be for him surer than life itself. 

Second, he sees evil overcome in his own life. 
He has met with courage and trust every dark 
thing that has come to him. Now he learns at 
last that for the man who meets it aright, there 
is no pure and final evil. There is a transmuting 
power in the spirit of faith and obedience. The 
darkest hour hid some heart of light. The convic- 

" Tennyson, In Memoriam, XCVI. 



86 A WORKING FAITH 

tion comes at last that, whatever may have caused 
the ill, God has made it serve for good. 

Third, he sees evil as that which is being over- 
come in the world, as that which is doomed, which 
is here only to be destroyed. That does not ans\^er 
all questions as to why evil is and whence it came. 
It does declare that in this world it is God that 
reigns, not evil. The men who are most confident 
in God and the winning of good are not the closet 
philosophers who theorize about evil. They are 
the men who are fighting with evil hand to hand, 
\^ho know best its blackness and its power, but 
who see it being overcome and set at naught day 
by day by the power of purity and love and simple 
truth and goodness — ^by the power of God. That 
is the answer of Jesus. He did not say. Be of good 
cheer ; there is no evil. He said, "Be of good cheer ; 
I have overcome the world." ^^ And so here, as 
elsewhere, our working faith is not an easy theory, 
but a stirring challenge. And he that doeth the 
will shall kno^'.^^ 

>s John 16: IS. " John 7: 17. 



CHAPTER III 
THE BIBLE AND FAITH 



«T Tl THAT other book like this can awaken dumb or 
» V sleeping consciences, reveal the secret needs of 
the soul, sharpen the thorn of sin and press its cruel 
point upon us, tear away our delusions, humiliate our 
pride, and disturb our false serenity? What sudden 
lightnings it shoots into the abysses of our hearts! What 
searchings of conscience are like those which we make 
by this light? And when we have gained a right appre- 
hension of our shortcomings and spiritual poverty, when 
the need of pardon, the hunger for righteousness, and 
the thirst for life torture the soul to desperation, what 
other voice than that of the Son of man has power to 
allay our pain, convince us of the love of the Father, 
the love that passeth knowledge, in which all shame and 
remorse are swallowed up, and the flame of a holy life 
is kindled in the soul? The word which pierced us like 
a sharp gword now sheds itself like balm over all our 
wounds, like consolation over all our sorrows. It be- 
comes a source of inward joy, a strength for life, and 
a hope which shines beyond death itself. . . . The 
word which draws us so irresistibly to God and so in- 
vincibly attaches us to Him can come from none but 
Him. ... It has no more need of oflicial verification, 
of outward attestation, than the light which enlightens 
the eye, or the duty which commands the conscience, or 
the beauty which ravishes the imagination. The efficacy 
of the divine word is at once the inward sign, the meas- 
ure, and the foundation of its authority." 

AuQUSTK Sabatier, ReUgious of Authority, 242, 243. 



Chapter III 

THE BIBLE AND FAITH 

Changing Views 

"1^7 HAT is the place of the Bible in a working 
» ' faith? A couple of generations ago that 
question would have been very simply answered: 
"The Bible is the Word of God. What is in these 
pages God has written. We are simply to take 
what is written here and believe it." The answer is 
not so simple to-day. Nowhere has the change in 
traditional thought been so great. To multitudes 
the modern study of the Bible is confusing and dis- 
quieting. The foundations of faith seem shaken. 
We turn to the Old Testament. The scientist tells 
us that this story of creation does not agree with 
the record he reads in the rocks. The historian 
tells us that this picture of a flat earth and a solid, 
rounding firmament in \^hich the sun and stars are 
fixed for the convenience of men, is simply taken 
from ancient stories of the East. The critic tells 

89 



90 A WORKING FAITH 

us that these first books are composed of different 
narratives which have been joined together, that 
some of these books were the growth of centuries. 
The student of rehgion points out how crude some 
of the rehgious thinking is here, and how rude and 
even savage some of the ethics of such a book as 
Judges. Our fathers put the books all upon one 
plane; did it not all come equally from God? We 
distinguish sharply Old Testament from New, and 
the ideas of Paul from the teachings of Jesus. 
For them everything came directly from God: we 
study sources and authors and editors. For them 
this history and these writings formed a world by 
themselves. We find the influence of other nations 
and know that this current flowed in the great 
stream of human history. In one word, for them 
the Bible was a book that came directly from the 
hand of God. For us it is a great literature that 
has grown out of a people's life, intensely human, 
bound up with the things of earth, its history 
linked with that of other nations. No wonder the 
questions come: Is the Bible still a Word of God 
to us.? Has it still authority for us.? What is 
the meaning of this change that has taken place? 
To answer that we must first find out more defi- 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 91 

nitely what this change really is, and try to distin- 
guish the old from the new. 

The Traditional View 

The old conception of the Bible was perfectly 
simple. To have a true religion you must know 
about God. To know about God He must speak 
to us. The Bible is the book in which He thus 
speaks : thus God is its Author. Man could not 
have any real part in it, for then the human and 
imperfect would be there. Therefore it must be 
the literal and mechanical product of God. The 
men who wrote it were simply the "pens of the 
Holy Spirit;" it was not their thought or spirit 
or experience that entered in, it was His dictation. 
If God is directly the Author of all, then all is 
equally true. The Bible all stands upon the same 
level. The ethics of Judges are just as divine as 
the Sermon on the Mount, the psalms of impreca- 
tion are just as Christian as Paul's great chapter 
on love. 

Now let us not be too scornful of all this. It 
is true that the Bible itself condemns it on nearly 
every page by what it actually shows. But no 
theory like this, which held the conviction of ear- 



92 A WORKING FAITH 

nest men for generations, can be without founda- 
tion. Back of it lay a great need and a great 
experience. The great need was man's need of 
God, his cry for some sure knowledge of God in 
the midst of all the uncertainty and change of 
human life. The great experience was that God 
had met men and spoken to them in these pages, 
that here they had found the living God and life 
for themselves. And all our new study of the Bible 
will be worth very little unless it does justice to 
that great fact which leaves the Bible still to-day 
the greatest study for the human mind. 

It was not the experience, then, that was at fault, 
but the theory in which the experience was ex- 
pressed. We can see now what was wrong in the 
theory and what influences came in from without 
to cause this. We may note first its intellectual- 
ism, the idea that religion means a sum of truths 
which men must know and believe. That meant 
that men must have a text-book of religion. With 
the Jews it was a code of laws, for to them religion 
was primarily something to be done. With the 
Christian Church it meant a book of teachings, 
for religion was primarily something to be believed. 
The great founders of the faith do not speak so. 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 93 

the prophets and Jesus and Paul. With them 
reHgion is a hfe, and God comes to men in fellow- 
ship, not as a doctrine. 

The second mistake was in the mechanical con- 
ception of inspiration. My typewriter is just a 
machine under my hands. I write with it what I 
will. I ask from it no insight, no love, no surren- 
der of will or life. God does not play upon men 
that way. They are never mere pens for His hand. 
He gives His truth to the life of men, and out 
of that experience the man speaks of God to 
others. 

The third mistake was in its dualism. That is 
the theory which divides the world sharply into two 
parts, the divine and the human, and sets the two 
over against each other. It seems easy to say: 
"Either this book is from man, and so is imperfect, 
or it is divine and perfect. If God is present, then 
we must rule out all the human; if man is here, 
then there is no God. This book is either human 
or divine." Like many other simple answers, this 
is not true. Life is far richer than such easy logic. 
What our working faith has emphasized has been 
not God separate from the world, but God living 
and working in the world and in man. So far from 



94 A WORKING FAITH 

one excluding the other, we must say, where God is 
most fully present there is most of man, man at 
his best and highest. Where man is at his highest, 
there God is most really present. The Church 
forgot the meaning of the incarnation when she 
came to the doctrine of the Scriptures. In her 
teaching as to Christ she had rejected these heresies 
of dualism. One party had said, "He is divine, 
and therefore His human nature is not real." And 
the other had said, "He is human, and so He can 
not be really divine." The Church said, "He is 
divine and human, and both in fullest truth and 
measure." It is so as to the Bible. It is not in 
some miracle of loaves and fishes that God is most 
truly present, nor in some book dropped from the 
blue sky; it is in a human life, simple, reverent, 
loving, obedient. 

And finally the old vie\^' was wrong in its theory 
because it left no room for real growth. If the 
book is literally God's writing, then the first pages 
must be as absolutely true and divine as the last. 
Now, religion is life, and life means growth. When 
men ruled this growth and movement out of the 
Bible, they left it a lifeless book of the letter. 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 95 

The Modern View 

The modern Bible study begins with the same 
faith as the old: that God is in the writings, that 
here is a message for men. But it leaves the old 
theories to one side, and instead says: Let us look 
at these writings as they are. It is one thing to 
say that God comes to men: it is another matter 
to ask how He comes. The old theory without 
much regard to the Bible itself determined just 
how the Bible must have been written. To-day 
we are asking, with the modern scientific and real- 
istic spirit, What is really here? What we have 
found as we have looked at these writings in this 
way is that we have here a human book. Here is 
no book dropped down from heaven, but something 
that has come up out of the life of the people. 
Here are the tales of its ancient heroes. Here is 
the story of its wars and its oppressions. Here are 
the wise maxims of its sages, the stirring sermons 
of its preachers, the book of its songs and prayers, 
and its laws for every part of life. It is no book 
of the dead letter. It throbs with life. "Prick it 
anywhere, and it will bleed." Here are the prayers 
and tears and hopes and longings, the story of sin 
and failure, the story of high aspiration and splen- 



96 A WORKING FAITH 

did faith and deed. Because it is a human book 
there is real history here. This Kfe is bound up 
with other life, and knows movement and progress. 
The movement is not always upward. The great 
prophets are like mountain peaks, and the land 
slopes away on this side as on that. But the for- 
ward look is always there, and the dawn yields 
at last to the full day, and we move up to the 
Christ. And how intensely human the men are 
whom we meet: Isaiah with his vision and his bold- 
ness, Hosea with his tragic life, Amos outspoken 
and fearless, Micah with his passion for men and 
righteousness, Jeremiah with his mingled tender- 
ness and strength ! And when we come to the high- 
est of all, the human element is not least, but 
richest. In all this human book the most human 
part is the Gospels. Look at their pictures from 
the life of our Lord: helpless child and loving 
mother, growing boy and anxious parents, the 
friends and the craving for sympathy and com- 
panionship, hunger and w'e.ariness, the hours of 
prayer, the garden with its struggle and its crying, 
and the words upon the cross. 

If all this be true, if it be this human book, 
how is it that God comes to us.^ What place has 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 97 

it in our working faith? Once we had the word 
of God to men, fixed and definite. Now it seems 
as if we had nothing more than man's search for 
God and the picture that he has made of Him. We 
can no longer simply take word for word and say, 
Here is what God has written; believe this and 
do this. 

Let us ask first of all, What is it about which 
our working faith is really concerned.'^ It is cer- 
tainly not a matter of dates and authorship. Nor 
is it an infallible book of doctrine that we must 
have. Our real concern is this: Is the living God 
here.'^ Does He speak to us, and does He find us 
here.'^ This is the real question. No theory can 
make this book divine for us. And no arguments 
are needed for it. This experience is the vital 
matter. The fact remains for our faith that he 
who comes with open mind and reverent heart, 
who wills to do His will, shall find God here with 
His gift of mercy and of a new life. That is what 
the fathers meant by their teaching about the wit- 
ness of the Spirit. 

But our question is not yet answered. How 
is God present in this book.? Our answer must go 
farther back than that. We have misunderstood 



98 A WORKING FAITH 

the Bible because we have started with the Bible, 
we have made a book the beginning of the Chris- 
tian religion. Now, Mohammedanism is a book 
religion. It bases ever3rthing upon these words 
given to Mohammed from heaven. Mormonism is 
a book religion. It, too, claims to have begun with 
words dropped out of the sky. Christianity is not 
a book religion. Its fundamental fact for faith 
is not a book dropped from heaven, but a living 
God in His world, molding that world which He 
made, moving in history, coming into fellowship 
with men. First the deed, and then the word; 
first the history, and then the writing ; first the liv- 
ing experience, and then the message. When we 
start with a book as our foundation, then we must 
have something finished, external, static, lifeless. 
And so we have the whole mechanical, lifeless theory 
of the Bible. Here is something vital, dynamic, 
with movement and progress. It is God, not drop- 
ping a finished book into His world, but Himself 
present in that world, giving His life to men and 
speaking through them, with the Scriptures as a 
great monument and expression of this movement. 
We have already gained these great facts for our 
working faith: A living God in His world, a per- 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 99 

sonal God coming into fellowship with men, and 
religion not primarily as a belief or a deed, but a 
fellowship of man with God. Let us see the mean- 
ing of this for our present discussion. Here is 
room, first of all, for God among the nations. Such 
a God as we hold can not have done less than to 
seek, and that constantly, to draw all nations into 
fellowship with Himself. The great word of Rev- 
elation applies not to the few among the favored 
nations, but to all men and all peoples, "Behold, 
I stand at the door and knock." ^ Not to Israel 
alone did God come, but to China and India and 
the isles of the sea. We do not need to decry 
paganism in order to exalt Christianity. We have 
been over-narrow in our zeal. Even the Old Testa- 
ment shows the larger vision. Isaiah lets Jehovah 
speak of "Egypt My people, and Assyria the work 
of My hands, and Israel Mine inheritance." ^ Amos 
show's us Jehovah judging the other nations just 
like Israel, assuming their knowledge of right and 
truth, and declaring in a wonderful passage that 
He has been in their fortunes as in those of Israel : 
"Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto 
Me, O children of Israel .^^ saith Jehovah. Have 

1 Rev. 3:20. asa. 19:25. 



100 A WORKING FAITH 

not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, 
and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians 
from Kir?"^ Nor can we forget Paul's fine word 
of the nations whom God hath not left without 
a witness nor without a law in their hearts.* We 
need not blind ourselves to the darkness of non- 
Christian lands. Their faiths could not lift men 
to confidence and peace. But it has not all been 
darkness. Every^vhere we find some hunger for 
God, some searching after Him, some ideals of 
truth and right, some power for good. There is 
some wheat with the chaff of their sacred books, 
they had their prophets and heroes, their Gotama 
Buddha and Confucius and Socrates. We are 
studying these reHgions to-day as never before, 
and at every gleam of light and truth we rejoice 
and say, Here, too, God was present and speaking 
to men. 

But the God who stands at the door of men and 
nations forces no entrance. Man's answer condi- 
tions His deed. Some doors are closed to Him, 
others He finds open. One nation above others 
opened its doors to God. There He found men, 
leaders, prophets, whose hearts were all attent upon 

•Amos 9: 7. 'Acts 14: 17; Rom. 2: 15. 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 101 

His voice, whose lives were open to His will. 
Through those men He spoke His clearest word. 
It was a little people, but He chose it for His great 
world-plans. This is not theory, but plain history. 
No nation has such a story as this little people; 
not China with her long centuries and her teeming 
millions, not Egypt of immemorial antiquity, nor 
the Greece of beauty and wisdom, nor the Rome of 
conquering power. Here was a little nation whose 
land at the time of its greatest power might be 
dropped down within the borders of any one of a 
score of our States. She came a nomad tribe from 
the desert. Her culture was borrowed. She never 
had any art of her own. She boasted no philoso- 
phers. Her triumphs in war were few. She lay 
upon the highway that linked three continents, and 
the world-powers of these great lands trampled 
her in turn under foot. She had a few brief years 
of outward glory at a time when her great neigh- 
bors were too busy to molest her. Aside from that 
brief period her history is the tale of the great 
nations to whom she was subject: Egypt, Assyria, 
Babylonia, Syria, Macedonia, Rome. She had no 
^schylus, no Plato, no Praxiteles, no Alexander, 
or Julius Caesar. Two thousand years ago she was 



102 A WORKING FAITH 

scattered throughout the ancient world as she is 
among the nations to-day. Then as now her people 
had to face prejudice and contempt and persecu- 
tion. And yet through all these years Israel has 
been the teacher of the nations. The nations that 
have despised her have placed her writings among 
their sacred books. And when they have turned 
from art and commerce and war to the higher mat- 
ters of faith, it is her voice to which they have 
listened and her God whom they have worshiped. 

If you ask what aU this means, the answer is 
not far to seek. Other nations had their own am- 
bition, Israel's passion was God. Other nations 
had their captains and poets and philosophers, Is- 
rael had her prophets. Whatever may be said of 
the people, you may search the story of all other 
lands in vain to find such a line of men as these. 
Here the waiting God found an open door. Here 
were men who waited until the vision filled their 
soul. They saw the Lord high and lifted up, and 
thenceforth feared no man.^ They read God's 
heart of righteousness and mercy, and so rose 
above ritual and sacrifice. They came from all 
ranks of life, with priestly lineage, from royal 

» Isa. 6: 1. 



THE BIBLE AND FAlTH 103 

court, from peasant's home. And some of the 
greatest words come from men whose very name is 
lost. To-day there are a thousand men who read 
Isaiah to one who knows a line of Homer, and ten 
thousand who have hid some psalm within their 
hearts to one who has ever opened a Plato. 

But we have not yet come to the Scriptures them- 
selves. We have simply seen how God found one 
nation to whom He could give Himself, through 
whom He could further His plans for the whole 
world. What came first in His dealings with this 
nation? The answer is, first the deed and then 
the word, first the movement in history and then 
the writing that came forth from it. It is the de- 
liverance from Egypt that writes the first great 
chapter in Israel's history. To that event prophet 
and psalmist turn back again and again, how Je- 
hovah took a people that was not a people, and 
gave Himself to them as their God. God's grace 
and mighty help, the nation's love and trust and 
loyalty, these are the rich lessons that flow from 
this experience. They form Israel's first step be- 
yond a natural religion to a real ethical faith that 
lifted it above the nations round about. Or take 
the other great series of events beginning with the 



104 A WORKING FAITH 

eighth century and ending with the exile. Here is 
the story of the danger from the north, of tem- 
porary deliverance for Jerusalem, of final captivity 
for Judah as well as Israel. What a list of names 
is linked with these two centuries: Isaiah, Amos, 
Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, and the great prophet 
of the exile. No other nation, not even the great- 
est, has given the world in all its history what 
Israel brought forth in this brief span of her time 
of peril and shame. But it was not a book that 
God gave here. It was life, history, and men to 
interpret the message in living words. Out of it 
all came forth the imperishable words that we pos- 
sess, but the life came first. 

If we turn to the New Testament it is the same. 
Here we meet the real foundation of Christianity, 
and we find not a book, but a life and a deed. 
For years the early Church grew and thrived and 
spread abroad, and yet had no collection of Chris- 
tian writings. The Church was not founded upon 
the New Testament, but the New Testament grew 
out of the Church. First the life and the deed, 
then the \^riting. Out of the mission work of the 
Church came the Epistles, out of the preaching of 
the Church grew the Gospels. In the Old Testa- 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 105 

ment "the word of Jehovah" refers to the living 
message of the prophet, not to any book or writing. 
So in the early Church the Gospel meant the good 
news that passed from lip to lip, with no fixed 
form of words, but always made fresh again by 
living experience. It is well past a century before 
we find the name applied to any of the written ac- 
counts which we call the Gospels. This, then, is 
our first position, God's revelation is through life 
and history. From this will follow certain con- 
clusions which we may put in order and which 
the thoughtful reading of the Bible will make 
plain. 

The Historical Revelation 

First, this historical revelation of God will be 
gradual. A book can be written at once, and men 
may be left to understand it later. But God deals 
with life, and life means growth and slow develop- 
ment. God shows that to us every day anew. 
Every child gives the lesson. We do not set ge- 
ometry before a child of six. We do not argue 
general moral principles before a child of three. 
We come with pictures, not abstract propositions; 
with do and don't, and not with elaborate ideals. 



106 A WORKING FAITH 

God IS a good pedagog. The Old Testament shows 
His training of a race in its childhood. Here are 
pictures and symbols and myths. Here is much 
that is crude and imperfect. We have stumbled 
over this in the past. We have said that this is 
true or not true, either God is here or not here. 
Here is a people declaring that Jehovah has com- 
manded them to sack a city and raze its walls and 
kill not only the fighting men, but women and 
little babes and cattle and sheep. Had our armies 
done the same with a single village in the Philip- 
pines, no matter what savage, debased cannibals 
were there, we should have been overwhelmed by 
the protest from the Christian conscience of the 
world. Were they right .^ No! Shall \^'e throw 
these pages overboard then, and say there is no 
truth or God in them? No! This is truth and 
life in the making. This nation is moving toward 
the light, and the mistaken loyalty and zeal will 
reach higher ends at last. Let us say the same 
about the psalms which are full of the spirit of 
vengeance, and about many another place. They 
are stumbling-blocks only for a wrong theory of the 
Old Testament, which makes it all equally and ab- 
solutely the direct speech of God. Make it the 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 107 

story of the long, slow work of God with a people, 
and it becomes a history full of movement and in- 
spiration, in \^hich these defects mark only the 
stages that have been left behind. 

Second, this historical revelation is personal. 
The heart of it lies in those men who see the mean- 
ing of it all. These are the men whom God has 
lifted up into fellowship with Himself. Through 
them He interprets His deeds and His purpose. 
Through them He calls to the people and leads the 
people on. In other words, it is a religious revela- 
tion, one that comes in a living experience and 
speaks out of this. 

Third, the revelation is more than God showing 
Himself, more than God giving the truth to men. 
We must use a bigger word than revelation, and 
that is redemption. It is God giving Himself. 
It is God carrying out great purposes. It is God 
working toward the Kingdom which is the end of 
history and the meaning of the world. That great 
redemptive movement, as it takes shape on earth, 
we call religion. Church, Christianity, life. 

Fourth, the Scriptures are the great monument 
of that movement and that revelation, and they 
form, in turn, the great agent by which that reve- 



las A WORKING FAITH 

lation is brought to others and the life passed on 
to men. 

This, then, is our new conception of the Bible, 
human and divine at once. What we feel, first of 
all, is how human it has made the book. The old 
theory pushed it up into the clouds. Its men be- 
longed to another world. Some of us can sympa- 
thize with the little girl who was astonished to 
find that Jerusalem was actually on the map in her 
geography. When Conybeare and Howson's "Life 
of St. Paul" came out, good people were shocked 
because it treated Paul like a real man, traveling 
from place to place amid actual scenes. The old 
view made the Bible a book of law and letter and 
doctrine. For us it is a book of life. We see not 
one book, but many, the literature of a nation. 
All the life of that nation unrolls before us. Above 
all, its great men live for us again. We have re- 
discovered the prophets. They are not lonely seers 
looking into the future and concerned only with 
what is far a\^'ay. They are the great preachers of 
their day, watching the horizon of the nation, see- 
ing the distant foe, knowing the political and social 
problems of their day, filled with the Spirit of God, 
consumed with a passion for righteousness, and 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 109 

giving their fearless message of reproof and com- 
fort to people and to king. So Paul lives for us 
again ; not the traditional theologian, but the man 
whose thought grew out of his own deep experi- 
ence; the missionary who laid broad foundations 
throughout the old world; the man of vision and 
courage, who saw the meaning of Christianity as 
a new world-religion and fought for the freedom 
of the faith. Courageous, independent, humble, de- 
voted, man of passion and power, he stands out 
for us as one of the great figures of all time, not 
a theological figure, but a living, breathing man. 
One other gain we have made in getting this 
human-historical Bible. We have found the va- 
riety and the difference. The old thought left no 
room for this. How could there be difference when 
all came equally and directly from God.^^ What 
we see now is not so many words, but so much life 
which God has inspired. In the Old Testament 
there is nothing less than the whole literature of 
a nation in all its varied forms. It is this vital 
and individual character that lends so deep an in- 
terest. But the variety brings us more than this. 
It has helped us to distinguish the central from the 
peripheral, the vital from the incidental. The 



110 A WORKING FAITH 

Bible is not a level plain. It has valleys and foot- 
hills and mountain peaks as well. It is all needed, 
but not all of equal value. It is not faith to 
believe all this, nor religion to practice it all. The 
prophets of the Old Testannent have a message 
that rises far above the prescriptions of ritual and 
sacrifice. The New Testament stands above the 
Old, and Jesus is supreme in it all. And that is 
our greatest gain. There has been a rediscovery 
of Jesus; His life, His teaching. His Spirit are 
clearer to us in their meaning and greater for us 
in their authority than ever before. And so the 
new study has helped us to understand better what 
religion is : not the acceptance of a theory, nor the 
submission to an outer authority, whether of book 
or creed or institution, but the humble, loving walk 
with that God who reveals Himself to the human 
soul. 

The Meaning of the Book 

We have been busy trying so far to distinguish 
and to define, but the most important task for our 
faith is not definition, but appreciation. And that 
appreciation does not mean the general reverence 
that goes so often with specific ignorance. What 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 111 

we need is patiently and earnestly to live with this 
book, to let its spirit speak to us, to let its life 
gain power over us, to find its great ideals that 
have set so many free, to meet the great spirits of 
the past that speak to us through it, to meet and 
know the greatest of them all, Jesus Christ, and let i 
Him lead us out of sin and doubt and weakness into 
the life of peace and strength that is in the pres- 
ence of God. What shall we find as we read this 
book with thoughtful mind and open heart? What 
have men found there for themselves in the past? 
They have found here, first of all, the book of 
God. We speak of the Bible as literature, but that 
is not why we study it. It is historical, and yet we 
do not go to it as history. Why should we con- 
cern ourselves with this feeble folk that lived so 
long ago in their petty, far-off land? We study 
it because we find the answer here to the deepest 
quest of human life, the search for God. The 
Bible is the one great religious book of antiquity. 
We have spoken of its variety. It is a library, not 
a book. And yet the Church has been right in 
all these centuries in calling it the Bible, the Book. 
There is one passion that breathes through it all: 
the passion for God. Its opening words set the 



112 A WORKING FAITH 

key: "In the beginning God."® Its histories are 
no ordinary narratives, for its tales of kings and 
wars are but texts from which to speak of God. 
Its poets cry, "My soul thirsteth for the living 
God.'"^ Its prophet-statesmen sound the same 
note, "I saw the Lord high and lifted up."^ Its 
last picture is a wonderful symbol of this same 
passion for God, the picture of the city that needs 
nothing else because God is there: "And they need 
no light of lamp, neither light of sun ; for the Lord 
God shall give them light." ^ 

But it is the book of God in a deeper sense. One 
of its writers says. We love God because He first 
loved us. All of them carry the deep conviction, 
not of their search for God, but of God's search 
for them ; that God has plans for this people, that 
God is moving through their nation and speaking 
to them. And as we read there comes the same 
great truth to us : Surely God is in this place. And 
then we come at last to its great central figure, and 
see with Paul "the light of the knowledge of the 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." ^° And 
that is why the book lives. The theory is an inci- 
dent. This fact means everything, that through 

6 Gen, 1:1. 'Ps, 42:2. 8lsa. 6:1. » Rev. 22: 5. "2 Cor. 4:6. 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 113 

all these years men have found here the mercy of 
God reaching down to their needs, the will of God 
lifting up their lives, and the presence of God 
made real to their faith. 

It is the book of man. It reveals man as truly 
as it does God. Albrecht Duerer once drew a pic- 
ture of the prodigal son, and when his friends 
looked at it the face of the prodigal was the face 
of Duerer himself. That was Duerer's way of 
confession. He had seen his own self in that story. 
We can all say, "In the roll of the book it is writ- 
ten of me."^^ Here we see our sin and know how 
deep it is. How many have found the Fifty-first 
Psalm as if written for themselves. The first great 
help of the Bible is to show men the great moral 
demand and their great need.'' But it shows us, 
too, the man that is to be. It takes the highest 
and noblest, nothing less than the Christ Himself, 
and says. This is your life; this you can be. And 
it is the book of man because it stands for human 
life and human right above all else. 

And it is the universal book. It belongs to every 
age and every nation, and it speaks to every need. 
"Bom in the East and clothed in Oriental form 

" Psalm 40: 7. 



114 A WORKING FAITH 

and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the 
world with familiar feet and enters land after land 
to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak 
in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It 
comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he 
is a servant of the Most High, and into the cot- 
tage to assure the peasant that he is a son of God. 
Children listen to its stories with wonder and de- 
light, and wise men ponder them as parables of life. 
It has a word of peace for the time of peril, a 
word of comfort for the day of calamity, a word 
of light for the hour of darkness. Its oracles are 
repeated in the assembly of the people, and its 
counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The 
wicked and the proud tremble at its warning, but 
to the wounded and the penitent it has a mother's 
voice. It has woven itself into our deepest affec- 
tions, and colored our dearest dreams. Above the 
cradle and beside the grave its great words come 
to us uncalled. They fill our prayer with power 
larger than we know, and the beauty of them lin- 
gers on our ear long after the sermons which they 
adorned have been forgotten." ^^ 

" Henry Van Dyke, The Century Magazine, October, 1910 



THE BIBLE AND FAITH 115 

The Authority of the Bible 

We have one question yet to ask. What is the 
authority of this book for our faith? The old 
idea was very simple. These are so many words of 
God, which we are simply to accept and believe. It 
is not simply our better understanding of the Bible 
which prevents this, but our better understanding 
of faith. No merely external thing can be authority 
for us. To bow to a Church or a creed or a book is 
not Christian faith. Christian faith is the surrender 
of our lives in obedience and trust to some person, 
to some other life; and the conviction of faith is 
the conviction which that person wakens in our 
heart. Only God Himself can be the final author- 
ity for our faith. But right here it is that the 
Scriptures gain their meaning for us, and in a 
real sense their authority. God comes to us 
through them. They are not only the great monu- 
ment of His work in the world : they are the great 
avenue through which He still comes to men. 
Through them He commands our conscience, con- 
demns our sin, stirs within us confidence, quickens 
within us the new life. The authority of the letter 
is gone. We do not bow before every word that 
is in the Bible. Only as God speaks to us through 



116 A WORKING FAITH 

them are these words authority for us. But these 
pages show us as no others the hving God working 
out His great plans in the world. These pages 
bring to us the great souls that were open to God 
and through whom God wrought and spoke. 
Above all this book brings to us Him in whom the 
grace and truth of God were perfectly revealed. 
And so, not because of the theory and not on ac- 
count of the letter, but because the living Spirit 
of God speaks to us and commands us here, the 
Bible is still authority for us. 



CHAPTER IV 
CHRIST AND FAITH 



fiiTj^IGHTEEN centuries separate us from this history, 
■■— ^ but if we ask ourselves seriously, What gives us 
the courage to believe that God rules in history, not 
merely through teaching and knowledge, but as standing 
in its very midst, what gives us the courage to believe 
in an eternal life? we answer: We venture it because of 
Jesus Christ." 

Adolf Harnack, Reden und Aufsdtze, II, 14. 

"Christ is the culmination of this divine history, be- 
cause in Him history finds its perfect work. . . . Every 
soul that attains to a high moral and religious life bears 
His mark. The moral world in which we live is His 
work." AuGUSTE Sabatiee. 

"Behold Him now when He comes! 
Not the Christ of our subtle creeds. 
But the Light of our hearts, of our homes, 
Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs; 
The Brother of want and blame. 
The Lover of women and men. 
With a love that puts to shame 
All the passions of mortal ken. 

Ah, no. Thou life of the heart. 
Never shalt Thou depart, 
Not till the heaven of God 
Shall lighten each human clod; 
Not till the world shall climb 
To Thy height serene, sublime. 
Shall the Christ who enters our door 
Pass to return no more." 
Richard Watson Gilder, The Passing of Christ. 



Chapter IV 
CHRIST AND FAITH 

WHAT is the place of Christ in our working 
faith ? Nowhere in our discussion is it more 
necessary than here to call to mind clearly our 
subject. A working faith is not a sum of doc- 
trines which men must accept. Rather it is a great 
spiritual conviction, giving our life guidance by 
its insight and strength by its confidence. It is 
not a burden to be assumed, but a strength and 
preparation for life's tasks. 

It is one of the tragedies in Christian history 
that again and again Christ has been made more 
a subject of theology than an object of faith. 
And so it has come to pass strangely that in our 
day for many searching souls the doctrines about 
Christ have become a stumbling block where Christ 
should have been for them the way. It is a very 
different picture that we find in the Gospels. What 
we see is Jesus as the inspiration of faith. He 
comes to men not as a problem, but as an answer. 
119 



120 A WORKING FAITH 

He comes to men who have lost the living God in 
the midst of dead laws, and teaches them to say 
"Our Father." He speaks to men who have grown 
faint with long waiting, and their hearts leap up 
at His word, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." 
And men of doubt and fear and sin go out of His 
presence into a new world that is lit up with the 
presence of a great and merciful God* 

Here is our question, Not what can our faith do 
for Christ, but \vhat can He do for our faith.? Can 
He show us God.^* Can He make plain life's task 
and meaning? Can He help us live the life and 
work the task.? In the end the question of doctrine 
must come. We, who have felt His power, will 
need to say as those of old. What manner of man 
is this.? But the question does not come at the 
beginning. The great philosopher Kant once 
summed up the final needs of life in three ques- 
tions : What can I know? What must I do? What 
may I hope for? These are the supreme questions 
for our working faith. What can I know? That 
is the question about God. What must I do? 
That is the question of duty. What may I hope 
for? That is the question of salvation, the help 
that my life needs here and the hope of the life 



CHRIST AND FAITH 121 

beyond. What answer has Jesus for these ques- 
tions ? 

Here, as else^^here, we do not start with any 
appeal to authority, either of the Scripture or the 
Church. Jesus Christ is more than a doctrine of 
the Church. He is more, too, than any record of 
the past. We shall assume that the picture that 
comes to us in the Gospels is essentially true. But 
it is not a picture from the past that we build 
upon. It is what He means to-day as a living 
reality, which men may test in their lives. It is 
Jesus Christ as a religious force and fact whom 
we shall consider, the greatest fact in human his- 
tory, the greatest force in human lives. 

Jesus and the Question or God 

What answer, then, can He give us to our first 
question, the question of God? What can I know? 
Is the world more than color and sound and form of 
finite things ; more than inscrutable power and ruth- 
less laws ? Is there God, and what manner of being 
is He? There is only one teacher in this field of 
faith to-day, and that is Christ. True, there is 
still doubt and unbelief. Not all the questions of 
men have been settled. But wherever men have 



122 A WORKING FAITH 

reached faith, there Jesus is Master. Philosophers 
may give us arguments for God, and theologians 
elaborate their doctrines. But where men pray to- 
day in lands of light and leading, the God to whom 
they lift their hearts is such a one as Jesus showed 
to men. 

Men are wont to take this thought of God as 
a matter of course, without considering whence it 
came. We must go back if we are to understand 
\^hat Jesus did for our thought of God. The re- 
ligion of Judaism in His day was legalism. God 
was the Giver of laws and the Keeper of books. 
His precepts He had left with men. He Himself 
sat aloft. Religion was not a living fellowship, 
but an endless round of duties. True, Israel had 
her hope, but that meant simply that in some 
future time God would redeem men and dwell with 
them. It \^as not so now. There was nothing 
higher outside of Judaism, nor nearly so high. 
The pagan faiths were dead. Philosophy spoke to 
a few, but gave even these at most an idea, not 
the certainty of a living and loving God. The 
God of the Stoics was pure and lofty, but far re- 
moved from the life of men. And the mystery- 
religions, that were rapidly spreading through the 



CHRIST AND FAITH 123 

empire, were vainly trying to give men life and 
peace by ritual and sacrament, with no answer for 
the deeper question of sin and guilt. 

Jesus came. He had no doctrines to teach men 
about God. He gave them no rites to perform 
by which to bring God near. He took the simplest 
word of human relationship and taught them to 
say, Our Father. Every lip that speaks that 
name to-day as it looks to heaven confesses its de- 
pendence upon Jesus. True, you will find the name 
applied to God before this. It is not, however, the 
vessel that counts, but the content. With other 
nations it meant only physical descent. In the Old 
Testament it is used here and there of Jehovah as 
father of the nation, or of the king as the na- 
tion's head. It is not the name for the single 
humble man to use. And so in the prayers of Is- 
rael a score of other names are used as the wor- 
shiper calls upon Jehovah, but nowhere does the 
psalmist say. Our Father. At most the name meant 
a certain kindly care which Jehovah had for His 
people; their king was fatherly. Jesus took the 
word and made it absolute. The King is Father. 

But it is far more than a matter of name that 
we have to note. Jesus gave that name its mean- 



124 A WORKING FAITH 

ing. This He did, first of all, not by what He 
said of God, but by the life of Sonship that He 
lived with His Father. It was His reverence and 
fear, it was His love and trust, it was His joyous 
obedience, above all it was His life of fellowship 
in prayer that showed men not simply what it was 
to be a son, but what manner of Father in heaven 
men had. 

But more directly Jesus revealed the Father to 
men by the Spirit of the Father that was in Him. 
He speaks to us the same message to-day. Here 
is compassion and holiness; here is hatred of sin 
and merciful deliverance for the sinner ; here is the 
spirit before which we bow in reverence and to 
which we look up in aspiration; here is righteous- 
ness that condemns us, and mercy in which we trust. 
Here was a new spirit in the world: a power that 
served, and not merely ruled; a holiness that was 
free from sin, and yet drew near to sinners; a 
majesty of life joined to humility of spirit. Jewish 
Pharisee and Roman Stoic represented the highest 
thought of the world of Jesus' day. Both of them, 
in order to save the majesty and holiness of God, 
had to think of him as separate from men. Jesus 
gave a new conception of holiness in that love that 



CHRIST AND FAITH 125 

drew near to sinners, but only that it might over- 
throw sin. And men looked at all this holiness and 
mercy joined in one spirit in that simple life and 
said, This is the heart of God; here is "the light 
of the kno\\ledge of the glory of God in the face 
of Jesus Christ."' 

"So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too — 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, *0 heart I made, a heart beats here; 
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself! 
Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of Mine, 

But love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
And thou must love Me who have died for thee!' "2 

But Jesus gives us far more than the idea of 
God. He kindles the fire of religion in the hearts 
of men. Religion is not a doctrine or a deed. It 
is a spirit and a life. And life comes only from 
life. The first great deed of Jesus was to live the 
eternal life before men here in the midst of time. 
He showed us its simplicity and its depth, its 
beauty and its richness, its unshaken peace and 
its power to meet all that life could bring of duty 
or doubt or danger. He dwelt with God. It was 
his heart's passion to do the will of God; it was 
His strength to trust in God; it was His joy and 

1 2 Cor. 4: 6. « Browning, An Epistle of Karshish. 



126 A WORKING FAITH 

peace to walk in fellowship with God. He opened 
the heavens to men's eyes and gave men a new earth 
filled with the presence of God. He saw that Pres- 
ence in the color that touched the lily, in the light- 
ning that flashed across the heavens, in the fallen 
sparrow by the roadside. Men saw His life thus 
filled by the Eternal and cried, "Show us the Fa- 
ther."^ They heard Him talk with God, and be^ 
sought Him, "Lord, teach us to pray."* 

It is the thought of God that determines our 
conception of religion. Because Jesus speaks for 
us the final word as to God, He has given the final 
form to religion. His religion is as remarkable 
for what it leaves out as for what it includes. It 
is the universal religion. Judaism was the loftiest 
faith of His day, but it was a religion for a nation. 
Others might worship Jehovah, but they must first 
become Jews. For Jesus there is one God and 
Father, who knows no privilege of rank or nation, 
who calls men as men to be His children. It is 
the spiritual religion. Jesus does not abolish forms, 
but they have no necessary place. They count 
only as men fill them with the spirit. The essence 
of religion is simply the pure heart and the humble 

* John 14: 8. < Luke 11: 1. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 127 

soul before God, and invincible good-will toward 
men. And yet this religion of the heart was no 
matter of sentiment and dreams. Mere ecstasy, 
mere emotion, nay, not even worship was enough. 
The real practice of this religion was to be in the 
man's life with men. Men were to leave the gift 
at the altar and be reconciled to the brother. There 
was no room for those who said. Lord, Lord, but 
did not visit the brothers of the Lord when they 
were sick or in prison. It is the ethical religion. 
Not legalism. That is our way. We pile up laws 
to make men good. Jesus asked only for the right 
spirit. But how searching that demand! It is 
not enough to give alms; do you really love your 
brother? It is not enough to refrain from adul- 
tery; are your inmost thought and desire pure.? 
And His final test is no less than this : We must be 
children like our Father in heaven.^ It is a religion 
of divine redemption, redemption by God's act, not 
by man's effort. It is ethical, but it is more than 
that. It is God's demand, but it is also His gift. 
The spirit which He asks He Himself gives to men. 
Other religions show men searching for God. He 
brings God seeking men. That was the final mean- 

> Matt. 5:45. 



128 A WORKING FAITH 

ing of His own life, as we shall see: "God was in 
Christ reconciling the worid unto Himself."® 

We have not always held to this simple faith. It 
has been alike too simple and too lofty for men. 
We have burdened ourselves with long creeds and 
tried to make them the door to life ; we have turned 
the New Testament into another law and wor- 
shiped the letter of a book; we have shut up the 
mercy of God to institution or sacrament. But the 
simple word of Jesus has broken through these bar- 
riers again and again. God's mercy is not bound 
to Church or form. It asks only the open door 
of a penitent heart. God's service is the love of 
men. And the children of God are those who are 
like Him in spirit. 

Jesus and the Ideal of Life 

Our second great question we have called the 
question of life: What must I do? What is right 
and just and good? What shall I make of myself? 
How shall I live with men? 

First of all, we must say that Jesus is not a law- 
giver nor a maker of rules. He did not come to 
give men a new code. He came to give them life. 

•2 Cor. 6: 19. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 129 

It is a gross, though common, misuse of the New 
Testament to make it a new book of the law. 
Again and again He refused to answer men's ques- 
tions ; He threw them back upon themselves. 

But all this, regarded more closely, is just one 
reason why Jesus stands first as a teacher of life. 
The best of rules are but for a day. How wide 
a gulf separates the simple rural life of Jesus' land 
and age from the puzzling complex that makes 
our life to-day! Had He been a mere giver of 
precepts He would have lost His place long since. 
Three needs we have in this realm of conduct and 
life, and Jesus gives them all. First, we need not 
laws, but an ideal. Second, we want that ideal 
not in words, but realized in actual life. Third, 
we need not merely the ideal, but moral passion and 
power. 

It is not necessary for us here to analyze or sum 
up Jesus' teaching about the ideal. That of itself 
would not show us His mastery in this realm. For 
many, if not most, of His sayings we can find 
parallels among the rabbis or other teachers. But 
two facts remain clear. First, Jesus joined all 
these teachings in the unity of a personal ideal, in 
which nothing trivial, nothing secondary has its 



130 A WORKING FAITH 

place; in which first things stand first. Second, 
and far more important, Jesus set that ideal before 
men in Himself and lit up every phrase with a life 
that 'words can not exhaust. It is that life, even 
more than His words, which makes Him master in 
the world of conscience. "John Stuart Mill once 
said that the human race could not often enough be 
reminded that there once lived a man by the name 
of Socrates. He was right, but it is more impor- 
tant to remind humanity again and again that 
there once stood in its midst a man by the name 
of Jesus Christ."^ So Hamack begins his dis- 
cussion of "What is Christianity.?" We can do 
nothing more helpful for our study than simply 
to look at that life. 

And, first of all, we note its purity. The taint 
of sin is upon all other lives. We turn to them, the 
greatest and the best, who 

"Climbed the steep ascent to heaven 
Through peril, toil, and pain." s 

They are the victors who o'ercame, whose names 
we cheer. But the marks of the conflict are upon 
them all. The stain of dust is on their garments, 
and they have all known defeat. His life, too, had 

1 Wesen des Christentuma. » Reginald Heber. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 131 

its struggle, but He bears no stains and shows no 
scars of past sin or defeat. Our saints of earth are 
the last to speak of freedom from sin. The higher 
men rise spiritually, the more sensitive the con- 
science, the deeper the feeling of guilt. No men 
have uttered so deep a note of humble contrition 
as a Paul or an Augustine or a Luther. No man 
had so clear a vision of sin as Jesus. No man 
has ever made it so clear to men as the dark and 
damnable thing that it is. And yet He never once 
betrays even a passing sense of penitence or sug- 
gests a single time the consciousness of a need of 
forgiveness. He speaks the word of tender mercy 
to repentant sin, but it springs from no inner ex- 
perience of its meaning, only from the unsounded 
deeps of divine compassion. 

And yet there is nothing negative in this life. 
He is no recluse who has fled life's task in order to 
escape the world's temptation. The Church has 
spoken of His sinlessness, but the word seems nega- 
tive and colorless. He is not the traditional saint, 
pale, austere, other-worldly. Rather it is the posi- 
tive note and the note of richness that mark His 
life. The more we regard them, the more these 
two notes strike us with wonder: the completeness 



132 A WORKING FAITH 

of the life that touches every side of our desire and 
endeavor, and the positiveness of the life tK^t 
glows with passion and thrills us with its power. 

He lived in a day remote from us, in a humble 
hamlet of a remote province of that old Roman 
world, and He belonged to a people who alone in 
that great empire had fenced themselves off suc- 
cessfully in race peculiarity and religion. The 
Jew alone refused to be cosmopolitan. The Gos- 
pels which present Him to us come from Jews, for 
Luke relied upon Jewish sources. And yet we 
turn to that figure and know no separation from 
Him. We read those pages, and nineteen centuries 
drop oif like a garment. Only the eternal and time- 
less spirit speaks to us, and we hear it as the lan- 
guage of our day. We do not think of Him as 
Jew or as first-century dweller. He comes to us as 
man. And so He has come to men of all lands 
and all ages, not as another, but as their own. 

The same fullness and conlpleteness mark His 
life. Caesar is a great general, Augustine is a 
great theologian, Demosthenes an orator, Dante 
a poet. We have no class for Jesus. Never man 
spake as He, yet we do not class Him with the 
orators. He had the vision for beauty, and even 



CHRIST AND FAITH 133 

through tradition and translation the beauty of 
His words shines out. Yet we never think of Him 
as artist or poet. He searched the deep things 
of life and has given us our final word for man 
and God, yet we do not call Him philosopher or 
theologian. 

Yet what means most to us here is His complete- 
ness of character. All the qualities of a perfect 
life are present in Him. Elsewhere we find one 
or the other. In Him we find them joined. No- 
where is such humility, such utter dependence upon 
God ; nowhere such courage and independence over 
against men. In Him we see the tenderness of a 
woman; but joined to it is a virility, a masterful- 
ness which too often has been overlooked by the- 
ology and art alike. The Gospel pages show His 
love for children, His patience with all the weak; 
they show as well the flaming passion of a great 
and militant soul. He abounded with love and 
pity ; and yet how stem He was with Himself. In 
simple, wholesome spirit He enters into all the joys 
of men; yet side by side in perfect unity we see 
the nights of prayer and the life of perfect fel- 
lowship with God. He craves the fellowship of 
men and the special sympathy and friendship of 



134 A WORKING FAITH 

His chosen circle ; and yet in the great moments He 
stands alone, alone in the wilderness, in the garden, 
at the cross. 

What wonder that He speaks to every land and 
age, to every type of this race of ours. All have 
found their inspiration and ideal in Him. In Him 
is the spirit of all kind and tender mothers, of all 
loyal friends and lovers of men. He has been the 
inspiration of purity and truth, of all high and 
noble manhood that has quickened our lesser lives. 
His is the spirit of faith that has made men quiet 
and strong when all the world opposed them; the 
spirit of courage and chivalry, of all defense of 
weakness and all high hatred of wrong and op- 
pression; the spirit of love and courage t*hat calls 
for men to-day to fight against ancient wrong and 
new abuse, against oppression and cruel lust and 
hardened greed, and all things that make earth 
foul and curse the children of men; the spirit of 
glad and confident service that loves men and 
fights evil, and knows that the kingdoms of sin 
must perish and the rule of God must come. 

For nineteen centuries Jesus has led men along 
this path. All that has been high in spirit and 
endeavor they have caught from Him. It is but 



CHRIST AND FAITH 135 

sober history to declare that He has become the 
conscience of our race. We have only one alterna- 
tive to-day. It is the spirit of paganism or the 
spirit of Christ. The spirit of paganism is not 
yet gone. We see its selfishness, its worship of 
success and power, its scorn of all else. Now and 
then it ventures speech in some teacher like 
Nietzsche. But more and more it dwells in silence 
or hides its shame behind some show of deceiving 
phrases. All that the spirit of Christ means we 
do not yet know. But we do know that there is 
nothing beyond Him, as there is nothing higher 
than He to-day. 

"O Lord and Master of us all, 
Whate'er our name or sign. 
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 
We test our lives by Thine." » 

We have seen that the first need in this moral 
realm is not laws, but an ideal. The second need 
is to have that ideal realized in some life, so that 
it may have the meaning and power which life 
alone can give. We now note the third need, that 
of moral passion and power. In its deeper aspects 
we shall find the answer to this in the last part 

9 John Greenleaf Whittier, Our Master. 



136 A WORKING FAITH 

of our discussion. Here let us note but two facts, 
albeit facts of deep meaning. First, Jesus changed 
morality from a cold duty into a burning passion. 
There is no such thing as "mere morality" with 
Jesus. It is either more or nothing. Righteous- 
ness was no bare deed with Him. It was a spirit 
of self -surrender, of loyalty, of faith. It was a 
life to be lived, a new order to be established, a 
triumph in which men were to believe. It demanded 
the whole heart. That passion Jesus kindles in 
His followers. Others have set before men their 
ideals and have left them abashed, perhaps, but 
cold. Jesus sets men aflame with His own devotion. 
Only in such a passion is there moral safety and 
moral power for man; we are safe from the evil 
only when there is a good to which we surrender 
heart and soul. In His ethics of passion Jesus 
gives us the ethics of power. 

Second, Jesus showed in His own life the power 
of this moral passion not only as victorious in His 
life, but as the power that rules the world. In 
the darkest hour of His life we hear Him say to 
His fearful followers, "Be of good cheer, I have 
overcome the world." ^** And He had! Not by 

" John 16: 13. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 137 

force of arms, for such victories are but for a day. 
First of all, He ruled the kingdom of His own soul. 
And then He met the age-long forces of evil in the 
kingdoms of the world. There was brute force, set 
forth in Roman soldiery. There was the ancient 
selfishness of our race, with its malice and cunning 
and hate set forth in His enemies. And there was 
weakness and fear in His followers. And there was 
death itself that looked at Him from the cross. 
He faced them all, and conquered in the hour of 
the garden. He conquered not by an argument, 
nor an ecstasy, but by a great obedience and a 
great trust. The nineteen centuries that have fol- 
lowed are but a commentary on His words. Not 
hate and fear and force have won, but the Spirit 
of Him who met all this with love. And in the 
dark days that followed that death it was not 
simply an empty tomb that convinced the disciples, 
nor the vision of the risen Lord. It was the con- 
viction that such a life could not die, that such a 
death was victory. A thousand other men might 
die and come to life again, and our old world 
would move on just the same. It was the death of 
such a life, and it was life from such a death, that 
has transformed the world. And when our theories 



138 A WORKING FAITH 

and theodicies fail, when other powers come to 
threaten or seduce, when other skies are dark above 
our heads, we look at that life and say, Love is 
stronger than hate, good is mightier than evil, 

"God 's in His heaven — 
All's right with the world." n 

Jesus and the Question of Hope 

Our third question remains: What may I hope 
for? That is far more than the question of the 
life beyond. It is the question of life here and now. 
We have seen how Jesus meets two great needs 
of our faith. He gives us the vision of God and 
the ideal of life. But there is a third and far 
deeper need. It is the need of power, the gift of 
life itself. We catch the vision of the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in all His holiness 
and mercy, and we see the life that Jesus lived with 
the Father. But who are we, with our sin and 
guilt, that we should dare to walk with this God.? 
We see the ideal of life that Jesus shows us; but 
how are we to achieve that in our own life? Re- 
ligion means God and righteousness. Does it also 
mean help, help that we may walk \^ith this God, 

" Browning, Pippa Passes. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 139 

help that we may achieve this righteousness? If 
Jesus stands first in the realm of ethics and in the 
realm of revelation, has He any place in this realm 
of power? 

Let it be said at once that we come here to the 
real place of Jesus' Kingship. That is the mean- 
ing of those names in which the early Church spoke 
her faith when she called Him Lord and Master 
and Savior. Again, it is not a doctrine with 
which we are dealing, but a tremendous fact. In 
the realm of spiritual power Jesus stands first, and 
there is no second. The story is as easy to trace 
as is the marvelous development of applied power 
in industry in the last century. We know the 
story of iron and steam and electricity, of human 
power multiplied a hundred-fold by man's in- 
ventive skill. Here is another tale just as definite 
in its facts, and a thousand-fold more important 
because it concerns the higher reaches of life. 

The world before Jesus gave no promise of any- 
thing unusual in a spiritual way. Judaism was 
losing its life in a hard system of legalism, whose 
dreary routine w as growing more dreary and hope- 
less as it left the prophetic spirit farther behind. 
The old faiths of the Roman world had lost their 



140 A WORKING FAITH 

hold upon the minds of men. New faiths were 
springing up on every hand, but their very num- 
ber spoke of men's longings rather than their faith, 
nor did one of them face the real problem, the 
making over of men in a new moral spirit and life. 
They were giving themselves to mysteries and 
sacraments by which they hoped to achieve immor- 
tality. The problems of sin and guilt and right- 
eousness were not in their ken. Meanwhile vice 
was undermining the nations. It \^as this world 
that Jesus touched. From it He called forth the 
men who have been, through His Spirit, our leaders 
in faith and conduct to this day. Out of the 
Pharisees He led forth a Paul, from the publicans 
He called a Matthew, from ignorant peasants He 
made world-leaders, and beside them, equal in 
beauty of spirit and purity of life, the unnamed 
hosts who formed the communities of love and faith 
that soon spread throughout that Roman world. 
And that was only the beginning of the long line 
of great heroes and humble saints whose lives have 
blessed our kind. If we ask these men about their 
doctrines, they will differ. If we ask them about 
the power that has made over their lives, they will 
all make one reply. That common answer we find 



CHRIST AND FAITH 141 

in the New Testament. Pervading all its pages 
there is this wonderful dependence upon Jesujs 
Christ. All of them own themselves as His men, 
as those who have no faith, no hope, no strength 
except that which comes through Him. 

What, then, is it, let us ask, which makes Christ 
master in this realm of character and life? How 
is He maker and saver of men? How does He 
bring help into the life of men? 

First of all, He brings to men a sense of need 
and desire. Where Jesus begins with men is made 
plain enough by the Gospels. It is summed up in 
the word metanoia. The word repentance, of our 
English Bible, hardly translates it. It means a 
changed attitude of a life. The will is in it, but 
there is more than the will. The man's whole heart 
turns with a passion of sorroT^' and hatred from 
his sin, and with a deep desire toward God. An 
open heart is man's first need. How constantly He 
emphasized this! It fills the beatitudes, where He 
praises meekness, and purity, or singleness of heart, 
and the hunger and thirst after righteousness. 
That is why He places the child in the midst, the 
child that is open-hearted and humble and trust- 
ful. That was the stumbling-block with the Phari- 



142 A WORKING FAITH 

sees, who had lost the single eye and turned the 
light that was in them into darkness. And how 
His heart leaped with joy when Jesus found this 
sorrow and longing, which was most often, as we 
know, with humble folks and with publicans and 
sinners ! 

And if we ask how He wrought this we must 
say: by the ideal of life that He set before men 
and by the presence of God that He brought them, 
and these two in one. He had not so much to say 
about sin, except to Pharisees and some rich folks 
and mighty who were dead in their self -content. 
But to all men He brought the vision of the new 
life. He set it before them both in word and deed. 
He rebuked their sin and kindled their desire by 
the same message. It was the vision of holiness 
and the vision of God, that which made Isaiah cry 
out, "I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in 
the midst of a people of unclean lips;"^^ which 
made Peter exclaim, "Depart from me. Lord, for 
I am a sinful man!"^^ 

All this, though it means so much, was but open- 
ing the doors of men's hearts. Jesus did more; 
He brought God in. He smote men with this sense 

»Isa. 6: 5. "Luke 5: 8. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 143 

of sin only that He might heal them again. He 
made them feel their separation from God only 
that He might draw them near. He held up be- 
fore men such an ideal as had never been brought 
to them before. No outward deed, no observance 
of form would suffice. Men were to be children 
of the Father, like Him by an inner spirit of purity 
and mercy. And then He showed them this same 
Father giving to men what they could not them- 
selves achieve. If men could not keep the outward 
law, how could they achieve the inner spirit? That 
question Jesus answered by His gospel of mercy. 
God is willing to take men into the fellowship, not 
because they are the sons of His Spirit, but that 
He may make them such. Frame the theology as 
you wish, this is the fact: Jesus made men believe 
in the mercy of God and brought them into His 
fellowship. When He wrought a deed of healing, 
men saw the finger of God. When He spoke the 
\^''ord of forgiveness, men heard the voice of God. 
He gave men courage to cast themselves upon 
the mercy of God. The age-long purpose of God 
has been simply this : to form a community of men 
who shall live in the fellowship of God, In that 
great purpose Jesus is the consummate agent of 



144 A WORKING FAITH 

God. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto Himself,"^* so Paul interpreted Jesus' life. 

The supreme deed of that life the Church has 
always found in His death. Often it has inter- 
preted that death crudely, mechanically. It is 
never to be separated from the life in our thinking. 
We must think of it not as a death having value in 
itself, but always as the death of this Christ of the 
holy and merciful life. However we conceive it, 
the fact remains: Here men have seen, as nowhere 
else, God's hatred of sin, and the depth of their 
guilt, and the mercy of God drawing men into fel- 
lowship with Himself. The cross is not a tragic 
accident; it is not a passing incident; it is God's 
supreme revelation of His purpose in the world, 
and His supreme deed in seeking men for Himself. 

And so He who has given to men their highest 
ideal of life and their deepest conscience of sin 
and guilt, has given them also the sure confidence 
in God. Men have looked at Him and dared to be- 
lieve in the mercy of God at the very moment that 
He revealed their sin. And so He has been the 
open door for the Spirit of God to enter men's 
lives. And however we explain it, the patent fact 

M 2 Cor. 6: 19. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 145 

remains: Jesus Christ has been the creative moral 
force of history. Only life can mold life. Spirit 
alone can transform spirit. The only real agency 
that can make over men is a higher fellowship. 
And Christ means for men this fellowship and this 
life, "If any man is in Christ, he is a new cre- 
ation."^' 

And so the Church has always called Him Lord 
and Master and Savior. Long before they dis- 
cussed a doctrine of His person they made this 
confession which sprang from their lives. The 
generations since have shown one long line of wit- 
nesses to the same fact and faith. To the most 
sinful and degraded He has been the man of sav- 
ing power, to the ofFscouring of our cities' slums, 
to the offspring of ages of savagery in Fiji or 
Africa. He has been equal to the deepest need. 
And He has been master of the purest souls. The 
noblest voices of our race have brought Him the 
deepest, humblest praise. Count them one and all, 
the strongest and most saintly, the men whose deed 
and spirit lead us still: Paul and John, Augustine 
and Francis of Assisi, Luther and Wesley, and 
saints of our age like William Booth and Phillips 

» 2 Cor. 6: 17. 
10 



146 A WORKING FAITH 

Brooks. They will be the first to say, All we have 
is from Him. 

In Trinity churchyard at Boston you may see 
the monument erected to Phillips Brooks. There 
is the face of the preacher from whose lips so many 
thousands took their inspiration for life. Back 
of the figure, with His hand upon the preacher, 
you see the Christ. You may challenge the art 
of the monument, as some have done, but you 
may not deny its symbolism. The height which 
the noblest of our race have reached seems only 
to have given them a vantage from which they 
might better discern the depth of their need and 
the greatness of their Master. Not one of them 
would dream of setting his own name beside Him. 
In every other realm there are many masters. 
There is no one name that stands alone in phi- 
losophy or art or letters or science or invention. 
But when we come to the highest realm, where 
men ask for light for faith and help for life, we 
name One Name, and place no other beside it. 

And He is the Master of nations as well as of 
men. Slowly but surely His spirit has been set- 
ting the ideals for nations, and its power has been 
directing their history and shaping their institu- 



CHRIST AND FAITH 147 

tions. How many ancient wrongs that Spirit has 
overthrown! How many more stand condemned 
by it to-day ! Never has that spirit wrought miore 
mightily than in our own time. Before our eyes 
we see it laying hold of our modern industrial life, 
condemning its strife and selfishness and wrong, 
beginning here, too, its work of regeneration. Our 
very dissatisfaction, the sense of our social sin, is 
the fruit of His spirit working that repentance 
which must precede the new life. Men are ceasing 
to ask simply, Will it pay? They are saying, Is 
it right .P is it loving .^^ is it just between man and 
man? What the social order of to-morrow will 
be we can not tell. Of one thing we may be sure : 
it will be nearer the mind of Christ than the order 
of to-day. 

On the border-line between Argentine and Chile 
these two nations have placed a monument sealing 
their treaty of peace. High on the range of the 
Andes it stands, three miles above the Pacific. 
There where arms have often clashed in war is 
a statue of Christ, twenty-six feet in height and 
resting upon a great hemisphere, and beneath is this 
inscription: "These mountains will crumble to dust 
ere Argentines and Chileans break the peace which 



148 A WORKING FAITH 

at the feet of Christ the Redeemer they have sworn 
to keep." To-day we bring to Christ the questions 
and the needs of our single hearts. Some time the 
nations will sit at His feet, and His spirit shall 
settle all their questions. 

So deeply has the spirit of Christ already en- 
tered into the life of Christian nations, despite all 
our evils, that we can hardly realize how much we 
owe to Him. Only a study of a land without 
Christ can show how much not only the single soul, 
but the life of the nation needs Him. Turn to 
such a land, its ignorance, its superstition, its de- 
graded womanhood, its childhood without privi- 
lege, its lust unchallenged, its wrongs unrebuked. 
Our Western science will not renew the mind of 
such a land, our Western culture of mind will not 
give it moral power, our Western industry may 
but add to its burdens as with the child-labor in 
the factories of the new Japan. Who shall give it 
a conscience and the vision of a new life? Who 
shall train leaders in the spirit of unselfish service.? 
Who shall make human life sacred and transform 
human hearts? I can but answer by applying 
words that have been quoted by another with this 
meaning : 



CHRIST AND FAITH 149 

*'I know of a land that is sunk in shame. 

Of hearts that faint and tire; 
And I know of a Name, a Name, a Name, 

Can set this land on fire. 
Its sound is a brand, its letters flame; 
I know of a Name, a Name, a Name, 

Will set this land on fire." is 

His hatred of wrong, His love of men, His passion 
of service. His faith in God, His vision of a King- 
dom on earth, are the hope of India and China 
to-day. Neither is there any other name wherein 
they must be saved. 

Long years ago Jesus put His question to a 
little group of men: Who say ye that I am? He 
puts that question to us to-day. At the end of 
our answer, as it was with those disciples of old, 
there lies not the word of a moment, but the issue 
of eternal life. There are some questions that we 
do not need to decide. We do not need to choose 
sides as between Darwin and Lamarck. We do 
not need to determine what we should do as mayor 
of New York, nor how we should spend a million a 
year. But the matter of a working faith is not one 
of the optional questions of life. It is often said, 
"A man must live." Men have made the phrase 

1' Quoted by Robert Speer, Report of Student Volunteer Convention at 
Toronto, 220. 



160 A WORKING FAITH 

a cheap excuse for selfishness and disloyalty. The 
words have a deeper meaning. In their true sense, 
that is indeed our first obligation. A man must 
live. That does not mean that he must shun pain, 
or win success, or even preserve his physical being. 
That is not life. Life is to find the meaning of 
our being, the ideal for our endeavor, a God to 
trust, and help that will keep us true. For such 
living a working faith is no luxury and no option. 
It is the solemn necessity of the higher nature 
which is our destiny and which we can not escape. 
No man may ask these questions to-day with 
honest and open spirit and pass by Jesus Christ. 
His question, too, is not optional for us. We look 
for the highest ideal, and His life stands before 
us. We ask for a Highest that we may trust and 
worship. He shows us holiness informed by love 
and power ruled by both, and teaches us to say. 
Our Father. We cry for help that we may reach 
our goal. He challenges us by His word: "Come, 
and I will give you rest; follow Me, and I will 
make you — men; be of good cheer, I have over- 
come the world.'"' "Who say ye that I am?"'^ 
He does not ask it to enforce homage, but to show 

" Matt. 11: 28; 4; 19; John 16: 33 " Mark 8: 29. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 151 

us the way of life. And so, like those of old, we 
call Him Lord and Master and Savior, and we too 
say: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the 
words of eternal life?"^® 

Miracle and Doctrine 

There are other questions that arise for us, which 
have been hotly discussed in our day. What of 
the miraculous in Jesus' life as reported by the 
Gospels, the stories of His birth and the miracles 
of His ministry ? And what of the doctrine of the 
Church concerning His divinity, His dual nature 
as human and divine. His place in the Trinity.? 

And first as to the miracles. As we have already 
concluded, we are bound by no reverence for the 
letter of a record to take every miracle as literal 
fact. We are bound rather to consider and to 
discriminate. Granted, then, that some stories of 
miracles may have arisen from misunderstanding 
or legend, what of the rest? Two things may be 
said in brief. If the supreme power of the world 
be personal, not material or natural, and if Jesus 
be the supreme manifestation of that Person in His 
purpose for the world, it is not only possible for 

uJohn6:68. 



152 A WORKING FAITH 

thought, but reasonable as well that such a mani- 
festation should be accompanied by the miraculous. 
Jesus' deeds of healing, for example, can only by 
unpardonable historical violence be taken out of 
the Gospels. Second, for our working faith this 
question of the miraculous is not the question of 
first importance. The miracles are no support or 
basis for our faith, either in the actual experience 
of the modern man or in logical reason. What is 
essential to our faith is this, that the supreme 
reality in the world is person, that the world is 
neither above God nor opposed to God, but exists 
by His power and is here as the instrument of Him 
that worketh His purpose in all things. It is not 
the miraculous that we need to concern ourselves 
about, but the supernatural; that is, this divine 
personal as the real and supreme power of the 
world. "God was in Christ," that is our great 
truth. However it may have been in the past, 
such a living faith is not built upon a demonstra- 
tion of the miracles. Rather it is because of such 
a living faith that such a belief in the miracles has 
its place with us. It is Christ who makes credible 
the miracles, not the miracles which bring us to 
the faith in Christ. 



CHRIST AND FAITH 153 

And what as to the Church's doctrine as to the 
person of Christ? Let us note again what we have 
considered at the beginning. Christ is not a prob- 
lem for our faith: He is its solution; He is not a 
burden : He is the help by which we rise. He makes 
us see the meaning of life. He brings us the sense 
of guilt and the high desire at the same time. He 
brings us the living God and leads us out of our 
sin into fellowship \^ith Him. True, He comes 
with a challenge and a demand. But He does not 
ask us to believe doctrines about Him. He asks 
us to trust Him and obey Him. No man, indeed, 
ever asked so much of men as He. "Leave your 
nets," He says to one. "Sell all that you have," 
He says to another. "Forsake your home and 
kindred," He calls to a third. To them and to us 
all He says, "Arise and follow Me." The demand 
is one of obedience, and He speaks it only because 
He knows that He voices the will of God and that 
He brings life to men by the power of God. Such 
obedience is the simplest and the hardest demand 
that Jesus can make upon men. Until men answer 
this demand, it makes little difference what theories 
they hold about Him. The days that accepted 
the doctrine without question have often been times 



154 A WORKING FAITH 

of deepest disloyalty to the Spirit of Christ, when 
men put His cross on their banners and carried 
pride and ambition and hatred and murder in their 
hearts. The supreme question for my working 
faith is, Can I trust Jesus Christ in the life that 
He demands, in the God of mercy whom He brings? 
But the first does not rule out a second. This 
is the beginning ; it is not the end. If Jesus Christ 
means all that has been set forth in these pages, 
then there is much more that must be said of Him. 
The very first Christians began saying this. In 
these discussions we have not gone beyond them. 
But we have taken their high words of confession 
to express our faith in Him. Simply to tell our 
experience of what Christ is to men, we have had 
to say Lord and Master and Savior. There is 
more that lies beyond. But what further must be 
considered lies mainly with theology, and need not 
be taken up in the outline of a working faith. The 
men of the New Testament said in the forms of 
their day the highest that they could of Him. 
The Greek theologians who framed the Church's 
doctrines said the highest that they could in the 
forms of their thought. Back of both was the 
faith and the life. The forms may change. We 



CHRIST AND FAITH 155 

will hold to the faith and the life. The test at last 
will be here: 

"Not he that repeateth the name, 
But he that doeth the will." 20 

And that is why Christ Himself shall abide. 
The language of one age grows often strange to 
the next. But the life that God made remains in 
its needs the same, and the God who can meet 
those needs abides unchanging. 

"Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter. 
Churches change, forms perish, systems go, 
But our human needs, they will not alter, 
Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow." 21 

*• Longfellow, Christus, Cambridge Ed., 622. «» John Campbell Shairp. 



CHAPTER V 

A SOCIAL FAITH 



w 



HEN ye pray, say, Father, Hallowed be Thy name. 
Thy Kingdom come." Jesus, Luke 11: 2. 



"With righteousness shall He judge the poor, and de- 
cide with equity for the meek of the earth. And right- 
eousness shall be the girdle of His waist, and faithful- 
ness the girdle of His loins." Isaiah 11: 4. 

"He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and 
what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and 
to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?" 

MicAH 6: 8. 

"When Christ came and changed the face of the 
world, He did not speak of rights to the rich, who had 
no need to win them; nor to the poor, who would per- 
haps have abused them in imitation of the rich. He did 
not speak of utility or of self-interest to a people whom 
utility and self-interest had corrupted. He spoke of 
Duty, He spoke of Love, He spoke of Sacrifice, of Faith; 
He said that they only should be first among men who 
had done good to all by their work. And these thoughts 
breathed into the ear of a society which had no longer 
any spark of life, reanimated it, conquered the millions, 
conquered the world." 

Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man, I. 



Chaptee V 

A SOCIAL FAITH 

A Social Age 

r llHE social interest is the deepest concern of 
-*" our day. There may still be those to whom 
it seems a mere passing craze. Most of us realize 
that it has come to stay. It is one of those great 
steps forward which mankind can never retrace. 

There are three aspects of this social interest 
to-day. There is, first, the social passion. It is 
man's love for men- — not the love for some men, 
for those of our family, of our class or color or 
speech, but for men as men. Nor is our concern 
for just a part of the man. Men used to talk 
about loving souls. Now we speak of loving men. 
The toil of little children who should be at play, 
the starved lives of the poor, the oppression of an 
unjust wage, the broken life of the prisoner, the 
hunger of India's millions on the other side of 
the globe, the cry of all these rings in our ears and 
will not let us rest. 

159 



160 A WORKING FAITH 

There is, secondly, a new social insight. We 
are beginning to see how many of our questions 
are social. In some matters we must take men one 
by one. One by one we must turn men from sin. 
One by one men must find their fellowship with 
God. But there are other questions that must be 
settled together. The world is more than a sum 
of single men. One and one make more than two. 
They make home and Church and State. There are 
great questions of wages and health and morals 
that must be settled for the social whole, and not 
for the single man. We must make ne\^* men for 
the sake of the world. We must make a new world 
for the sake of men. We have always had social 
service, but not always this social insight. We 
have reformed drunkards and left the saloon alone. 
We have cured a few folks in sanitariums, but have 
not wiped out the slums that breed tuberculosis. 
We have cared for maimed victims, but have not 
stopped industrial accidents. We have levied fmes 
and built prisons, but have not earnestly set our- 
selves to change conditions that bring forth vice 
and crime. The fine and the jail, indeed, have 
often furthered what they sought to check. 

And then there is a new social hope to-day. A 



A SOCIAL FAITH 161 

few years ago the great National Conference of 
Charities and Corrections spent most of its time 
discussing the alleviation of need. Now its great 
question is, How shall we stop up the sources? 
Men are stirring with a new vision. Poverty is 
not necessary. Disease may be banished. There 
is a whole world of suffering and wrong that is 
most tragic because it is so needless. And deeper 
even than this is the conviction that the earth is 
rich enough to give a due share of life to all the 
children of men. Men are filled with the hope of 
a new world, and the new world is not to be beyond 
the skies, but here and now. 

Nowhere has this new spirit become more ap- 
parent than in the Church. Twenty-five years ago 
these questions were almost wholly absent from the 
great Church gatherings. Now they are the center 
of interest and awake the quickest response. There 
are not wanting those who look askance at all this. 
What has religion to do with these matters? Is 
not faith a simple question of the soul and God? 
God and soul and heaven, are not these the three 
points that fix the curve of religion? And is not 
this whole movement sweeping the Church away 
from her real task? 
11 



162 A WORKING FAITH 

To all this we say, No ! The social stirrings of 
the day are the product of the Christian reHgion. 
We are in the midst of the revival for which the 
Church has been praying. But it has not come 
after the manner of our planning, and we have not 
recognized it. It may be a one-sided revival. That 
is what we have often had. We have seen men 
cry out because of their individual sins and seek 
escape from hell. To-day men are being convicted 
as to their social sins and are asking how they 
may bring heaven upon earth. Not all social un- 
rest has this conscious spiritual meaning, but it 
was never so richly present. This deeper note of 
sympathy, this widening sense of brotherhood, this 
passion for righteousness, this faith in a new day 
and a better world, this is of the very spirit of 
Christ. 

Is this the field of religion.? Yes! The God 
of our working faith, we have already seen, is the 
God of all time and of all the earth. If Chris- 
tianity had no ideals for these new hopes, if it 
had no guidance for our social task, then it would 
remain the religion of a corner until a new faith 
should come which was as large as the life of man 
and as deep as his needs. Have we only an answer 



A SOCIAL FAITH 163 

to the single soul and not an answer for the world ? 
The world never had so deep need of the answer of 
the gospel. The social passion is here. Democracy 
is releasing forces that no man can measure. For 
France, in her day of revolution, they meant de- 
struction. Have we a power that can direct them.^^ 
Can we set for men to-day a true social goal ? Can 
we bring men to repentance of their social sins and 
unsocial spirit .^^ Can we give the power, moral 
and spiritual, that is needed for the social task.? 
These are the final questions of the social move- 
ment. To-day we are hotly discussing methods 
of reform, ne\^* laws and charters and constitutions. 
They are important, but they are not first. And 
these questions that stand first only religion can 
answer. That is the real issue involved as we ask 
the social meaning of our working faith. In our 
answer we will consider first the social ideas, then 
the social spirit, and last the social power of Chris- 
tianity. 

The Social Ideas of Christianity 

The thought of the Kingdom is the first great 
social idea of our faith. There is a very simple 
conception of religion summed up in three ideas: 



164 A WORKING FAITH 

a distant God in heaven, man upon probation here 
on earth, and a heaven or hell to which this man 
shall go. That circle shuts in a good deal of truth, 
but it shuts out a good deal as well. Human his- 
tory means more than a few men picked out of a 
wreck. We must go back to our first discussion. 
God is in His world shaping through the long ages 
a great purpose. Some time all the forces of na- 
ture and all the institutions of men shall obey 
that will. That glowing hope Jesus held before 
men. He did not say, Repent, that you may go 
to heaven. He said. Repent, for the Kingdom is 
at hand, the Kingdom of God here on this earth. 
We have tried to get a little corner of the earth, 
a section of men's lives, and hold it for God. Jesus 
had the spirit of the Old Testament: The earth is 
the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Some time 
the whole world shall be new. Sin and want and 
shame and wrong and every unrighteousness shall 
be done away. And not in the quiet place of 
prayer alone shall God's will be done, but where 
courts sit in judgment, where men gather for trade, 
where the wheels of industry turn, and wherever 
the work of men is done on earth. 

The second great social idea of our faith is the 



A SOCIAL FAITH 165 

thought of God. Only a contrast will bring out 
that meaning. The gods of the old pagan faiths 
were only magnified men. They had all the jeal- 
ousies and hatreds, the passions and the weakness 
of men. The Stoics lifted their God above all this. 
It was the noblest thought of God which that old 
world had conceived. But in raising him above 
human weakness they raised him above human pity, 
too. There was no frailty, but there was no love. 
He dwelt for them far apart from what might 
defile or might disturb, where 

"No sound of human sorrow mounts 
To mar his sacred everlasting calm." 

Here was a great example for the Stoic philoso- 
pher, but no help for the Roman world. Here was 
no faith to stir to social deed or to give a social 
hope. 

The prophets and Jesus give us another picture. 
Here is the same noble elevation: "As the heavens 
are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher 
than your ways."^ But there is no separation. The 
elevation is but the measure of a greater love. "As 
the heavens are high above the earth, so great is 
His loving-kindness toward them that fear Him."^ 

»Isa. 65:9. « Psalm 103: 11. 



166 A WORKING FAITH 

Here is no being remote, indifferent. It is a God 
of passion moving in the life of this earth. Here 
is the passion of pity: "In all their affliction He 
was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved 
them. In His love and in His pity He redeemed 
them, and bare them and carried them all the days 
of old."^ There is love here, but without weak- 
ness. It is no sentimental emotion. It flames out 
against iniquity like the Christ with the scourge 
in the temple. Against all that harms and op- 
presses it is a militant power. "He shall smite the 
earth with the rod of His mouth, and with the 
breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked."* He 
is a God of holiness, but there is no separation 
here, Stoic or Pharisaic. It is a holiness which 
drives Him into the world to overcome all that is 
unrighteous and unjust. It is like the holi-ness of 
Jesus which made Him the companion of sinners. 
He is righteous. But the righteousness is not that 
of the judge, who stands apart and watches the 
conflict of our life and then passes upon the issue. 
He is in the fight. "With righteousness shall He 
judge the poor, and decide with equity for the 
meek of the earth."* It is the picture of a God 

>Isa. 63:9. «Isa. 11:4. 



A SOCIAL FAITH 167 

who is here In His world setting up righteousness. 
We end our search for God where Lowell founJ 
the Christ: 

"I knelt and wept: my Christ no more I seek. 
His throne is with the outcast and the weak." s 

Here is the heart of our social creed. All else 
is but explanation and application. And here is 
the ground of social faith. Our hope does not 
rest upon the last election returns, nor the number 
of those whom we count upon our side. The world 
is organized upon the side of righteousness. The 
stars are fighting in their courses against Sisera. 

"Right is right, since God is God 
And right the day must win; 
To doubt would be disloyalty. 
To falter would be sin." 6 

And we need not only the enthusiasm, but the pa- 
tience and poise and quiet strength which come 
with this conviction. 

The third great idea is the conception of man. 
How simple it seems! Jesus took a common man 
by the hand and led him out under the stars and 
said: The God of heaven and earth knows you. 
You are under His care. The hairs of your head 

« Lowell, The Search. « Frederick W. Faber. 



168 A WORKING FAITH 

are numbered. When you pray, speak to this Lord 
*of all and say, "Our Father," for you are His 
child. He took the least of human beings, a little 
child. It had no rights before the law. It was 
nothing. But He said, "Whoever shall cause one 
of these little ones to stumble, it were better for 
him if he were cast into the sea.'"^ He spoke to 
men, not great men or noble, but just common men, 
and declared that the life of one of these common 
men outweighed the whole world: "What doth it 
profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit 
his own Hfe?"" 

Only a contrast with the world of Jesus' day will 
show what these words meant. Human life was the 
cheapest thing in the world. Privilege was sacred, 
rank was sacred, property was sacred. To raise 
hands against these meant death. But man was 
not sacred. The child had no rights. The woman 
was commonly a chattel. The world knew no real 
democracy. Greece ? Its democracy was the leisure 
of the few resting on the slave-labor of the masses. 
The full radicalism of this teaching we are 
just beginning to see in our own day. Our la^^' has 
been founded upon that of Rome, the chief interest 

*Mk.9:4ie. 8Mk.8:36. 



A SOCIAL FAITH 169 

of which was the protection of property. To-day 
we see that the chief concern of society should 
be man. Here is the deep undercurrent of unity 
that flows through all our turmoil of conflicting 
movements and programs to-day. No right of 
birth; no ancient privilege; no institution, however 
hoary with age ; no right of property or of cunning 
and power shall stand before the right of man. By 
this principle we are testing our institutions to-day. 
Here is the State. Once its glory lay in triumph 
of arms. But war itself stands condemned by our 
test. Lloyd George spoke our new social mind 
when he declared in a speech, not long since: "It 
is as deep a stain upon the National flag that its 
folds should wave over slum-bred and half-starved 
children, over ill-paid, ill-fed, ill-housed working- 
men and women, as if it were to wave over defeat 
in a stricken field." The measure of the State is 
in the men and women it brings forth. 

We are testing modem industry in the same way. 
So far the test of industry has been production 
and profit. No wonder we have boasted of its prog- 
ress. What marvels of invention we have brought 
forth! How we have made the forces of nature 
work for us! And how wonderfully we have or- 



170 A WORKING FAITH 

ganized both industry and commerce! But what 
about men? Machinery has multiplied productive 
power a hundred-f old ; but where has its product 
gone? What of the constant throngs of the un- 
employed, and the greater number of those who, 
in the midst of this wealth, do not even receive a 
living wage? What does all this progress mean 
in terms of manhood? For scores of thousands of 
laborers our great steel industry has meant twelve 
hours of toil, seven days in the week, year in 
and year out. For scores of thousands of little 
children the prosperous cotton industry has simply 
meant a dreary stretch of toil where sunshine 
and play and study should have been. We 
boast of the product of factory and quarry and 
mine. What of the human by-product of injury 
and occupational disease and death? Can we for- 
get that year by year we maim and slay more men 
and women in the quiet pursuits of industry than 
fell year by year during the terrible quadrennium 
of our Civil War? Years ago, when the ne^^' cot- 
ton industry was heaping up wealth for England, 
Robert Owen, himself a manufacturer, saw this 
human aspect. He saw laborers herded in hovels, 
little children of eight and nine dragged from their 



A SOCIAL FAITH 171 

beds at three or four in the morning to work till 
late at night, and from the poor-houses other chil- 
dren as young as six and seven driven to the same 
task. Our new conscience applauds Owen's words : 
"Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political 
superiority of our country if it depends on the 
cotton trade, rather than that they shall be upheld 
by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life."^ 
Lowell's parable still has its message for us: 

"Then Christ sought out an artisan, 
A low-hrowed, stunted, haggard man, 
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin 
Pushed from her faintly want and sin. 
These set He in the midst of them. 
And as they drew back their garment-hem 
For fear of defilement, 'Lo, here,' said He, 
'The images ye have made of Me!"'io 

The next great idea of our social faith is that 
of righteousness. The Church of the past laid its 
stress upon charity in the relation of man with man. 
But the deeper note of Christianity is righteous- 
ness. Here is the foundation of the Kingdom. 
We must go back to the prophets of Israel to get 
the real meaning of the word. Righteousness with 
them was no bald justice distributing to each what 

9 Quoted by Spargo, Socialism, 39, " Lowell, A Parable. 



172 A WORKING FAITH 

he had earned. It was no cold insistence upon some 
out\^'ard standard. It was a vision, and a passion 
which flamed alike with loyalty to God and love 
for men. It was a protest in the name of all that 
suffered against all that was wrong. It was a con- 
viction that some time all oppression and injustice 
would be overthrown. For them this was God's 
great concern. For that reason it became man's 
great task. And so ritual and sacrifice and form 
retreated to the background. They heard only the 
God of the poor calling out to men, "Cease to do 
evil; learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the 
oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the 
widow." ^^ The sins that they scourged were the 
sins of injustice. "Woe unto them that join house 
to house, that lay field to field till there be no room. 
Woe to them that devise iniquity and work evil 
upon their beds ! When the morning is light, they 
practice it, because it is in the power of their hand. 
And they covet fields, and seize them; and houses, 
and take them away : and they oppress a man and 
his house." ^^ 

It is this issue of righteousness that is the fun- 
damental question of our day. It is not a new 

" Isa. 1: 16, 17. « Micah 2: 1, 2. 



A SOCIAL FAITH 173 

political fad: it is a new conscience; and the cre- 
ators of that conscience are the prophets and 
Christ. We look out upon the world which God 
has made, smiling fields and great forests and rich 
mines. All this, we say. He made for man. For 
the rich man ? For the clever and the crafty ? For 
the man whose father was strong enough to get it 
and who himself is strong enough to hold it 
though the hungry poor are at his gate? No; 
God meant it for all men. He is no lover of the 
few. Turn now to the cities of men. Here the 
few live in wealth, often that which their hands 
never earned. Here are countless numbers, even 
in our ot^h land, who may not be paupers, but 
who have not enough to live a normal human life. 
Children must toil. Little ones have no real home 
because of mothers that must go out to work. 
Fathers know that death or an accident will plunge 
their famiUes into want. Great numbers of them 
are even denied the chance to work at any wage. 
Bodies are undernourished, and the dark and nar- 
row rooms of the city toiler show that even from 
sunlight and air these souls have been shut by 
the greed of men. Once men accepted this as the 
fixed order, that the few should have and the many 



174 A WORKING FAITH 

want. Now we know that it is not just, it is not 
right, it is not the purpose of God. 

Over fifty years ago Lincoln asserted the prin- 
ciple in his great debate: "That is the real issue. 
That is the issue that will continue in this country 
when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and 
myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle 
between these two principles — right and wrong — 
throughout the world. They are the two prin- 
ciples that have stood face to face from the be- 
ginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. 
The one is the common right of humanity, and the 
other the divine right of kings. It is the same 
principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It 
is the same spirit that says, 'You toil and work 
and earn bread, and I '11 eat it.' No matter in 
what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a 
king who seeks to bestride the people of his own 
nation and hve by the fruit of their labor, or 
from one race of men as an apology for enslav- 
ing another race, it is the same tyrannical prin- 
ciple."^^ 

It is this new sense of justice that is back of a 
hundred plans that as many enthusiasts are setting 

" From last joint debate with Douglas, October 15, 1858. 



A SOCIAL FAITH 175 

before us to-day. It is the new democracy, the 
democracy of life. It is not a bald communism 
that would divide up the goods of earth. It is 
society organized for the sake of men, and men 
having a fair chance at the goods of life. It means 
a child's chance to be healthily bom and fairly 
trained, to grow in mind and body, and be made 
ready for life's work. It is the mother's chance 
to make a home instead of being driven forth to 
work. It is the home's chance for privacy and 
decency and food and air and light. It is the 
man's chance for work, with safe conditions and 
reasonable hours and a living wage. 

A fair chance at the goods of life! Hitherto 
we have said that we must keep men from starving. 
Of late we have talked of a minimum wage, which 
means to most men that lowest recompense for 
toil that will keep soul and body together. Justice 
in our new democracy means more than that. Not 
bread alone, but books. Not scanty garb and a 
bare roof, but some share of light and life and 
beauty and love. We are not merely to keep alive 
the machine that works. We are dealing with 
men. Bodies may exist where souls starve. Men 
want not only bread, but roses. That is the 



176 A WORKING FAITH 

meaning of Oppenheim's song of the marching 
women : 

"As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the 

day, 
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray 
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun 

discloses. 
For the people hear us singing. Bread and Roses, Bread 

and Roses. 

As we comje marching, marching, we battle, too, for 

men — 
For they are women's children, and we mother them 

again. 
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life 

closes — 
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but 

give us Roses. 

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women 

dead 
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of 

Bread; 
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits 

knew — 
Yes, it is Bread we fight for — but we fight for Roses, too. 

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater 

Days — 
The rising of the women means the rising of the race — 
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one 

reposes — 
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread 

and Roses." i* 

H James Oppenbeim, Bread and Roses, American Magazine, Dec, 1911, 



A SOCIAL FAITH 177 

How this shall come it is not a part of our 
working faith to say. That belongs to politics 
and economics. But the power of this movement 
to-day lies in its great underlying moral ideals, 
and these are a part of our working faith. The i. 
earth is the Lord's; that stands first. We think 
Socialism is radical, but Christianity goes farther. 
Socialism says the instruments of production shall 
not be private property. Christianity says there 
is no private property at all. No m!an holds in 
fee simple, but only in trust for God; and that 
trust is for the benefit of men. We are familiar 
in our day with the man or corporation which says : 
"This is my business. I own it, and no one else. 
I can do with it what I will, close my factories 
or run them, set long hours or few. The State 
has nothing to say, and the working man only this 
one thing, whether he will take my proffer of em- 
ployment or not." This is disloyalty to God. 
Some time we shall see that it is a crime against 
society and the State. 

The Social Spirit of Christianity 

These, then, are the great social ideas of our 
working faith: the thought of the Kingdom, of 

12 



178 A WORKING FAITH 

God, of man, and of righteousness. What a 
mighty dynamic these ideas have been! And yet 
there is something deeper in Christianity than social 
ideas. It is a social spirit. If we look at early 
Christianity we see very little of theory and even 
less of formal organization. What we find is a 
spirit and a life. It was a new kind of religion. 
It did not rely upon temple or priest or creed. It 
had not even a Bible of its own, for its gospel was 
at first only a living word upon men's lips. It is 
significant that in the New Testament we have the 
word religion but five times, while righteousness 
is used 100 times, truth 120 times, life 185 times, 
and love 210 times. We have here a religion of 
life and of the spirit. 

But has that spirit a social meaning.'' At first 
sight it does not so appear. No one ever set 
forth so spiritual a conception of religion as Jesus. 
All that is external disappears. He drives man 
in upon his own heart and God. Race and lan- 
guage, rank and wisdom, priest and ritual are all 
left to one side. We see only the reverent soul 
bowed before God, and then walking the earth with 
this new spirit of sonship in its heart. But just 
here is the other side. The man not only bows 



A SOCIAL FAITH 179 

before the Father; he rises to live the life of son. 
That was the deed of Jesus. He made religion 
the pure life of the spirit, and then he flung it 
out into aU the highways of life, to walk all the 
ways of men and transform that life in all its re- 
lations. The spirit of religion with Jesus is fun- 
damentally social. 

There are three social aspects of this new spirit 
which we may note. It is, first of all, the spirit of 
purity. Christianity stood in absolute opposition 
to moral evil, to sin. That sounds like a theo- 
logical doctrine; it is a mighty social fact. 
Against all that was lustful, impure, obscene, 
brutal, bestial, Christianity waged from the begin- 
ning a war to the death. The pages of Paul are 
full of the echoes. The pagan world to which Paul 
came was not irreligious. There never were more 
religions, more temples, more religious circles and 
societies, a more earnest quest for God. But it 
was a religion with little thought of morality. It 
lacked moral ideals and moral power. Meanwhile 
the immorality of that day was undermining the 
life of whole nations. Paul gives us some glimpses 
into its dark depths. We know what its social con- 
sequences were: cruelty, oppression, poverty, dis- 



180 A WORKING FAITH 

ease, degradation. There were not wanting voices 
raised in protest, and the lash of the satirist was 
felt. The new religion canne, not with occasional 
warning and protest, but T^ith an eternal warfare 
alike in the soul of the single believer as well as 
in the world at large. 

Christianity is engaged in the same struggle to- 
day. This immorality has three notable forms in 
our modern life : drunkenness, gambling, and sexual 
vice. It ought not to be necessary to point out 
the social character and consequences of these evils, 
whose crushing burden falls upon none so hard as 
upon the lower ranks of toil. And yet few men 
know, after all these years of temperance agitation, 
what is involved in the liquor business. Each year 
we pay a quarter of a billion more for liquor than 
we do for meat. We spend four dollars for drink 
for every dollar that goes for flour. All our schools 
and colleges cost us a bare one-sixth of what we pay 
for beer and whisky. We might multiply by ten all 
that we pay for Sunday schools and churches and 
home and foreign missions, and yet not pay for the 
same drink bill. And yet all this refers only to 
the cost of the liquor itself. I believe that this is 
the lesser half of the bill, for we have not yet 



A SOCIAL FAITH 181 

counted in sickness, accidents, disease, shortened 
lives, police and courts and prisons, political cor- 
ruption, hospitals and asylums and poor relief, 
wasted grain and wasted labor, and the cost in 
happiness and peace and moral character which no 
money can measure. The Christianity which has 
made half of the territory of these United States 
dry in these last decades is rendering a social and 
economic service that no man can compute. 

The social evil does not represent so much in 
money, but its unsocial consequences are even more 
terrible. It is no mere euphemism to call it the 
social evil. No force strikes so directly at the very 
foundations of society. Physically it spreads a 
plague that counts more sufferers than tuberculosis 
or any other contagious disease, smiting not alone 
the guilty man, but the pure ^ife and the innocent 
offspring as well. It strikes at the home, which is 
at the heart of all social life and progress. We 
associate it with luxury and dissipation. But here 
again it is the working class that feels this curse 
soonest. Their children are exposed to the con- 
taminating sights and influences. The recruits for 
this trade of hell are taken mainly from their 
daughters. One of the most dire consequences of 



182 A WORKING FAITH 

this evil, as of gambling and the liquor trade, is 
its influence upon our political life. The immevise, 
almost unbelievable, profits that come from these 
sources to-day have been a chief fount of corrup- 
tion in our city government. And again it is the 
common man that suffers most from inefficient gov- 
ernment, for it touches him at every point: rents, 
light, air, cleanliness, recreation, schools, and all 
the conditions that shall make for or against the 
moral and physical health of his children. The 
plunder of property is the least evil in civic cor- 
ruption. The toll we pay in health of body and 
soul is its most terrific charge. 

There are fe\\' who realize how deeply en- 
trenched or how well organized these evils are. 
It is not a nrntter of controlling the passions 
of men. We have here a great business ap- 
pealing to the greed of men by its enormous 
profits, giving them almost limitless funds for 
the corruption of legislation and of law-enforce- 
ment, with human inertia and human weakness 
and passion to assist it. We shall have no full 
measure of welfare for our people, in industry 
and health and morals, until this fearful drain upon 
our life be stopped. And no force can stop it 



A SOCIAL FAITH 183 

except the moral passions let loose by religion. 
Every other voice is crying, "These are necessary 
evils; they are as old as human nature, and they 
will last as long as man." Christianity comes in 
with her cry of faith and her message of hope: 
"No evil is necessary or final, and no power is 
greater than right and God." The new attitude 
toward the social evil in these last years has been 
nothing less than a religious revival. And beneath 
the public conflict the Church is carrying on 
steadily the work of moral education by which alone 
the problem will be finally solved. 

It has been a great gain for us to realize that 
our social progress must have an economic basis. 
A fair \^'age, an adequate family income, is the be- 
ginning of all other things. Health, education, 
the training of childhood, and decent housing all 
cost money. But, after all, these necessary condi- 
tions simply give a fair chance for manhood. They 
do not make it. The palace may house vice, as well 
as the hovel. And you can have no health of the 
social body when its members are diseased. The 
spirit that wars against immorality in society and 
builds up moral power in the individual is a vital 
social force. 



184 A WORKING FAITH 

In its second social aspect this new spirit is the 
spirit of love. We might well call it the social 
spirit as such. It is the spirit which binds together 
family and community, city and State. We are 
near the heart of our social problems here. A sum 
of selfish interests, even if they coincide, will not 
make society. Nor will any set of principles, ho^v- 
ever lofty, accomplish the same. The French 
Revolution had fine phrases, but it had no more; 
and all its speech of liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity could not avert the doom which was brought 
on by the unsocial passions which that movement 
loosed. There must be some spirit which will join 
men together in a purpose that is higher than any 
single life, that will call forth a love and a loyalty 
such as no selfish interest will awaken. The un- 
pardonable social sin is selfishness and scorn. Rev- 
erence for man and the spirit of love, these form 
the social ideal. 

What this spirit means we shall see by again 
turning to the primitive Church. The world of 
that day was full of divisions. The outward unity 
of the empire embraced an inner discord that was 
as wide as its bounds. There was scorn enough 
of man for rajan : of Jew for Gentile, of Greek for 



A SOCIAL FAITH 185 

barbarian, of freeman for slave. Into this world 
the new Christian spirit came. Two things seem 
to fill the heart of Paul with ever renewed wonder. 
One is the mercy of God toward men in their sin. 
The other is the outworking of that same mercy, 
when it becomes the spirit of man, in breaking down 
the high barriers which ages of prejudice and 
passion and selfishness have reared. In that world 
of division he saw a new fellowship slowly spread- 
ing. It was the new brotherhood, "where there 
can not be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncir- 
cumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman ; 
but Christ is all and in all."^^ Here is no fervid 
rhetoric, but only the sober tale of what he saw 
in these communities that were spreading through- 
out the empire. How strong the inner bond was 
even the critics of the early faith will tell us. When 
one stood in need, the resources of the whole were 
at his disposal. There was no central authority 
and but little ecclesiastical control, but the Chris- 
tians of the empire knew their oneness and could 
act as one. Within this felloTVship every dividing 
power disappeared. It happened again and again 
that the highest places in the community were filled 

« Col. 3:11. 



186 A WORKING FAITH 

by men of lowest rank and even slaves. Reverence 
for man and the spirit of love were closely joined 
here. In consequence the limits of the community 
did not bound this spirit. All men were to be rev- 
erenced because all were children of God, and all 
men were to be loved because that was the way of 
God's loving, who made "His sun to shine upon the 
evil and the good, and sent His rain upon the just 
and the unjust." ^^ 
-^ The twofold danger of our social movement to- 
day is materialism and individualism. The former 
has already been referred to. It sees only one part 
of the social question: the economic. Individu- 
alism is the error of thinking that our social goal 
is reached when all men have their rights. But how 
shall we reach a social whole by an addition of in- 
dividual selfishness.? A vast amount of our social 
agitation to-day is simlply individualistic. Its ap- 
peal is to selfishness, its cry is not righteousness, 
but rights. We are socializing our institutions to- 
day. We are demanding a new world for men. 
But we are forgetting that we must have new men 
for the new world. Society is not a creation apart 
from men. We can not have a socialized State and 

"Matt. 6:45. 



A SOCIAL FAITH 187 

individual selfishness. We are the living stones that 
must make the temple. The socialized State de- 
mands socialized men. That means far more than 
that each shall concede to the other his rights. 
There is a big difference between the cry for rights 
and the passion for righteousness. We need not 
debate whether the new age will make noble living 
easier or not. One thing is sure, it will demand 
nobler living of men. Here is our movement to 
political democracy. We are giving to the common 
man his rights, but \\e are at the same time adding 
immense responsibility. Initiative, referendum, re- 
call, shorter ballot, these all mean less of govern- 
ment by delegation, more by direct action. Will 
it prove for the good.^^ That depends upon an- 
other question: After we have democratized poli- 
tics, can we socialize the voter .^^ It is the same in 
industry. Whether we have Socialism or no, we 
shall have increasing social control of industry. 
That of itself will not be a solution — it will be 
a challenge, a challenge to the common man. Will 
he show the spirit of self-control, of justice and 
vision and patience, of loyalty to the whole ? That 
is the final question here as everywhere, the spirit 
of a man. This is a day of confidence in laws and 



188 A WORKING FAITH 

institutions — an over-confidence. In its last analy- 
sis every social problem is ethical. It is a matter 
of personal relations. We must socialize the insti- 
tution, but it is even more necessary to socialize the 
man. 

The third aspect of this new spirit is that of 
service. Here especially Jesus wrought that "re- 
versal of values" which stirred the wrath of 
Nietzsche. The highest ideal of Jesus' day was the 
Stoic ideal, that of the wise man, strong, calm, 
poised, sufficient to himself in face of good or ill. 
Jesus knew no such self-satisfied calm. He drove 
men out of themselves: in aspiration toward God, 
in sympathy and service to their fellow-men. Life 
was for Him not the calm of a philosopher's repose. 
It was a great venture, a venture of faith in which 
men daringly rested in the mercy of God, a ven- 
ture of love in which men lost themselves in service 
in the life of their fellow-men. Christianity is no 
religion of weaklings. Its ethic is not the Sklaverir 
moral of Nietzsche's jeer. Its ideal is one of 
strength. But its strong man is neither the wise 
man of the Stoics, dwelling aloft and alone; nor 
the superman, holding others down \^hile he climbs 
his pedestal. He is the man who is strong enough 



A SOCIAL FAITH 189 

not only to mount, but to lift up others with 
him. 

It is needless to point out how from Jesus' own 
life the deepening current of unselfish service has 
flowed on in the life of our race. It is a long story 
of charities and philanthropies and reforms. It 
is a still longer tale of the quiet ministry of humble 
and forgotten folks in all the common relations 
which make up our real life. We have another 
question to face. When the new day of justice 
and right comes, will not the need of such service 
be a thing of the past.? Will not science and social 
justice banish poverty and sickness and all the 
other ills? Yes, that is what we are working for. 
The best philanthropy is that which makes itself 
ever less needed. All that does not mean that we 
shall not need kindliness and sympathy and friendli- 
ness in that day. And all that is of the future. 
Two facts stand out plainly for us now. The 
first is the need of leadership before the new day 
can come. Our democratic age needs more of 
service, not less. Its most encouraging sign is 
not the discontent of the poor, of those that have 
not, but the discontent of those that have. Day by 
day the number is growing of the men of wealth 



190 A WORKING FAITH 

and power and position who can not rest because 
of their brothers' need. Laws and institutions are 
not self-working. Loyalty, unselfishness, a high 
consecration of life will be called for more in the 
State of to-morrow than even to-day. 

The Social Power of Christianity 

We have considered the social ideas and the so- 
cial spirit of our working faith. Has it any social 
power, this Christian faith of ours ? No paragraph 
can answer that question, but Christian history 
makes no uncertain reply. We have studied the 
great ideas, but they have never been merely ideas. 
From the beginning these thoughts of God and 
man and righteousness and the Kingdom have been 
incarnate in those that believed. The social spirit 
of which we have been speaking has never been 
simply an ideal. It has been the creative deed of 
Christianity. Its source wsis not a dream, but a 
life, where 

"The Word had breath, and wrought 

With human hands the creed of creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds. 
More strong than all poetic thought." i7 

And this spirit of Christ has perpetuated itself not 
simply as ideal, but as the life of His disciples. 

" Tennyson, hi Memoriam, XXXVI. 



A SOCIAL FAITH 191 

That is the final article of our social faith: We be- 
lieve in the God who makes new men. We believe 
in Him who can change the selfishness and indiffer- 
ence and cruelty and scorn and blindness of men 
into that spirit of Christ which shall make the heart 
of the new age. 

A few years ago Mr. Wells wrote his story 
"In the Days of the Comet." It is a story of the 
Great Change. He draws three pictures. First 
comes the world of poverty and sorrow and strife 
that we know so well. Then one day the great 
comet draws near the earth. The world is en- 
veloped in its gases, and for a few hours all living 
creatures lie unconscious. Then out of its sleep 
and out of the old Hfe the earth savings again. But 
it is a new earth. The Great Change has come. 
The misery, the bitterness, the passion, and hatred 
are all gone. A new world of light and love and 
brotherhood is here, where the joy of each is in 
the welfare of the whole. Some time the great 
change shall come and our hearts are stirred at 
the vision. But it shall come not through some 
outer visitant, nor by laws and institutions alone. 
It must come by the way of the inner spirit and 
through the hearts of new men. We have many 



192 A WORKING FAITH 

things for which to work and pray : enforcement of 
law, purity in politics, democracy in our institu- 
tions, justice in industry. But our deepest prayer 
may well be: Oh, God, give us new hearts. Make 
us over in the spirit of Jesus Christ. Help us 
to hate wrong. Help us to love men. Help us 
to serve. And give us trust in God and faith in 
men and the confidence of the new day that is 
to be. 

A Social Ceeed 

This, then, is our social faith: 

I believe in the God of righteousness and mercy 
who is working in His ^orld for the good of man. 

I beheve in the Kingdom of God on earth as 
the goal of life, where all sin and wrong shall be 
overcome, where the will of God, which is the life 
of men, shall be done in all the earth, in court and 
mart, in factory and mine, in Church and home, 
and in the soul of man. 

I believe in men: in men whom God trusts — all 
men, and not the few; to whom belongs govern- 
ment; for whom God made this earth; whose wel- 
fare is the test of business and State and Church. 

I believe in justice as the great social principle 



A SOCIAL FAITH 193 

for man, as the great purpose of God. "Right- 
eousness and justice are the foundations of His 
throne." 

I believe in the spirit of Christ as the life of men : 
the spirit of purity that has sworn enmity to all 
that defiles and destroys; the spirit of love which 
reverences all men as children of God, which craves 
all men for fellowship, which alone can bind men 
together; the spirit of service in which each gives 
himself to his brother and spends his life for the 
whole. And I believe in Him who makes men new, 
who transforms the life of men by giving them the 
spirit of love and purity and service, which is 
Christ. 

This is not a philosophy of society. It is not a 
program of reform. Here, as elsewhere, our inter- 
'est is in a working faith. And here, as elsewhere, 
only he that willeth to do shall know. Here, too, 
in the end the deep things of God and the rich 
treasures of life shall be given not so much to him 
who reasons wisely as to him who loves and gives 
and lives. 



13 



CHAPTER VI 
THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 



<<rpHE true Church is still a sort of ideal challenge 
i to the faithful, rather than an already finished 
institution." 

"Every man who learns what the true goal of life is 
must live this twofold existence — as separate individual 
— yet also as member of a spiritual community which, if 
loyal, he loves, and in which, in so far as he is loyal, he 
knows that his only true life is hidden and is lived." 
JosiAH RoYCE, The Problem of Christianity, I, 54, 203. 

A scientist's conception of the Church: "A place in 
which, week by week, services should be devoted, not to 
the iteration of abstract propositions in theology, but 
to the setting before men's minds of an ideal of pure, 
just, and true living; a place in which those who are 
weary of the burden of daily cares should find a mo- 
ment's rest in the contemplation of the higher life which 
is possible for all, though attained by so few; a place 
in which the man of strife and business shall have time 
to think how small, after all, are the rewards he covets, 
compared with peace and charity." 

Thomas H. Huxley, Life and Letters. 

"Oft have I seen at some cathedral door 
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, 
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet 
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor 

Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er; 
Far off the noises of the world retreat; 
The loud vociferations of the street 
Become an indistinguishable roar. 

So, as I enter here from; day to day. 
And leave my burden at this minster gate, 
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, 

The tumult of the time disconsolate 
To inarticulate murmurs dies away, 
While the eternal ages watch and wait" 
Henry Wadswokth Longfellow, Divina Commedia. 



Chapter VI 

THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 

/"^NE of the strange facts in our life to-day is 
^-^ that we are facing an indifference to the 
Church at the same time with a deepening interest 
in rehgion. We are in the midst of a great revival. 
There are many in the Church who do not realize 
it, for it has not come in the old forms. We may 
see it in the deepening interest in all questions that 
concern faith. We may see it in literature, in 
the novels which deal with the questions of religion. 
It is present in the drama, for it is the religious 
appeal that has given the strength to such a pro- 
duction as "The Servant in the House." Most 
of all, the religious revival is to be seen in the 
quickened social conscience of the men of this day. 
Back of our great social and industrial movements, 
back of all our questions of political reform, back 
of the proposals of eight-hour day and minimum 
wage and industrial insurance, lies the growing 
passion for justice and for brotherhood. The 
197 



198 A WORKING FAITH 

maker of that conscience is none other than Christ, 
and the stirring of the new passion is a revival 
of His rehgion that is deeper even than the spirit 
of philanthropy which has marked the past age. 

Is it not strange, then, that in the midst of this 
all there should be marked on every side a strong 
indifference to the Church? The young men who 
would have turned to the ministry a generation 
ago are now looking to social service or a career in 
political reform. Laymen who might have given 
their strength fifty years ago to the work in the 
Church are seeking to serve men in movements 
outside the Church, while the masses of people 
seem to be increasingly unconcerned. It is not that 
they oppose the Church, they simply pass it by. 
Once the Church faced conflict and fought against 
bitter foes for her very life; in that conflict she 
grew. To-day it would almost seem that the 
Church which waxed strong against her enemies, 
might perish from mere indifference. What is per- 
haps most significant in all this is the fact that 
the men of large vision, the men of earnest, moral 
spirit, are turning aside from the Church because 
of their very earnestness. They see the Church as 
an institution concerned for its own life, debating 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 199 

petty matters of ritual and robes, of differing doc- 
trines and forms, and wasting its resources by its 
divisions. Outside are men oppressed, and ill-fed 
children bom in the physical and moral filth of the 
slum, and women exploited by greed and lust. 
Here, they say, is our work. We want to serve 
men; we want to be where life is real and life is 
full. We do not oppose the Church: we wish it 
well; but men's work and a man's life lie outside. 

There is much in that spirit with 'which we 
may agree. We stand for men, and religion is here 
to serve men and to save men. Our supreme con- 
cern is not an institution, but the triumph of the 
Kingdom of God. But the trouble lies not here. 
The failure is a wrong conception of the Church, 
and there is no deeper need for faith to-day than 
a right conception of that fellowship of faith and 
service which is bodied forth in the Church of Jesus 
Christ. We want no return to institutionalism, 
but the new day of faith must sound as one of 
its strongest notes the appeal to men on behalf 
of the Church. 

It is not high-churchism for which we are stand- 
ing here. Indeed, the first thing that we need to 
do is to overcome some of the old conceptions of 



200 A WORKING FAITH 

the Church which have ruled the past and against 
which men are reacting to-day. Here is the in- 
stitutional conception of the Church, the old 
thought that, somehow or other, a certain divine 
pattern of organization has been handed down, 
and that this organization and its forms are sacred 
in themselves. A very little study of the New 
Testament will show there is no ground for such 
a conception at all. Not one passage in the New 
Testament tells us how the Church is to be or- 
ganized. We catch the names of certain officers 
and certain leaders, but even if we degrade the 
New Testament to a book of laws, there is no law 
here by which to organize the Church. The 
Church has been miade, in the second place, a con- 
server of doctrines, the authority for handing 
down certain dogmas. Against that, too, we must 
protest in the name of religion, which comes with 
a message, but which does not ask men to accept 
a theology. Then there is the sacramental concep- 
tion of the Church, the theory that God has de- 
cided to give to men His salvation. His life, and 
His help only through the channel of certain forms 
and ceremonies and by certain men, and that this is 
committed to the Church. With this, too, men have 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 201 

grown impatient. Christianity is a spiritual and 
a personal faith, and it is broader than any insti- 
tution. All life belongs to God, and He may use 
any channel by which to come to men. No Church 
and no sumi of Churches have ever shut up within 
themselves the life from God. 

But ^hen we have put these conceptions of the 
Church aside, we have not yet settled our question. 
Here is the fact that confronts us: From the very 
beginning the growth of the Christian faith and the 
life of Christian men have been inseparable from 
the Christian Church. In her bosom the saints of 
all the ages have been nurtured. The noblest lives 
of our race, far-famed or humble, have gained their 
faith through her message and their strength in 
her fellowship. She has given birth to schools and 
hospitals and every manner of philanthropy. She 
has inspired the vast majority of those who have 
wrought in great reform or gracious ministry. The 
greatest treasure of our race, the story of Christ 
and of His first followers, was brought forth by her 
devotion and handed down by her care. Wherever 
Christian faith and life have gone, it has been by 
her missionary zeal. And nowhere do \^e find the 
Christian rehgion surviving without the Christian 



202 A WORKING FAITH 

Church. Is it not of deepest significance that, 
while the New Testament gives no command any- 
where to establish the Christian Church and no 
body of direction as to how this shall be done, yet, 
despite that fact, the Christian Church is there 
from the beginning? Does it not mtean that the 
Church is more than a matter of rule or command- 
ment, that it is essential to the very life of Chris- 
tianity and the inevitable outworking of its very 
spirit? 

If now we ask about the place of the Church 
in our vforking faith, we shall proceed just as we 
have done before. We shall not appeal to tradi- 
tion or authority. We shall ask simply, what is 
the witness of history and of the vital religious ex- 
perience of man. 

If we look at this essential spirit of Christianity 
as we have already considered it, we shall find four 
elements involved. This faith is a truth that is 
believed, and thus a message to be given to men. 
Second, the Christian life is a fellowship and in- 
volves a community. Third, this religion is a 
worship, and a common worship to which it calls 
men. Fourth, it unites men for common service. 
The Church lives on, not because of tradition or 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 203 

dogma or command, but because it embodies these 
great elements of Christian faith and life. How 
essential they are for that life and what they mean 
for men we shall see as we study them in order. 

The Church and Its Message 

The first meaning of the Church lies in its Mes- 
sage. The Church opens its doors because it has 
something to say to men. Jesus came as a teacher. 
The word that He read from the prophet in tha 
little home-town synagogue was the confession of 
His life-purpose. He came "to preach good 
tidings to the poor," "to proclaim the acceptable 
year of the Lord." Jesus looked upon Himself 
as a preacher. When He sent His disciples forth 
He gave them nothing to bear but a message. 

Now, our age is rather skeptical here. We are 
forever crying for "deeds, not words." We want 
actions, not ideas ; life, and not doctrines. And as 
for creeds, the silence of our scorn is enough. 
Jesus said, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but 
by the word." We reverse Him and say, Man 
shall not live by words, but by crop reports and 
balance of trade. The contrast is not between 
words and deeds, between doctrine and life; it is 



204 A WORKING FAITH 

between the life that is unthinking, unaspiring — 
that has no high meaning and no power — and the 
life that has found its purpose and inspiration and 
has joined itself to the eternal. 

The final forces of history are not armies, but 
ideas. Marion Crawford tells this story of Car- 
lyle: "It was at a dinner party, and Carlyle sat 
listening to the talk of lesser men, the snow on his 
hair and the fire in his amber eyes. 'The British 
people,' said one of the company, 'can afford to 
laugh at theories.' 'Sir,' said Carlyle, speaking 
for the first time during the dinner, 'the French 
nobility of a hundred years ago said they could 
afford to laugh at theories. Then came a man 
and \^rote a book called the "Social Contract." 
The man was called Jean Jacques Rosseau, and his 
book was a theory, and nothing but a theory. The 
nobles could laugh at his theory; but their skins 
went to bind the second edition of his book.' " ^ 
Paul went forth with a few ideas. No hands had 
been laid upon him. No great institution stood 
behind him. He came from a despised race with 
the tidings of a leader that had been defeated and 
slain. With that message he faced the world of 

» F. Marion Crawford in Doctor Claudius. 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 205 

Roman power and Greek culture. But when, years 
later, the walls of that great empire crumbled and 
its armies melted away before the onset of the tribes 
of the north, the foundations laid by this poor 
traveling preacher withstood the shock and bore 
the new civilization that now reared its head. 
Every pulpit is a depot of dynamite. The Bible 
might well be marked, "Highly explosive; handle 
with care." The Church of the Prince of Peace 
is dealing with the mightiest forces known to man. 
That force is needed to-day. The man who 
needs most to take the lesson to heart is the im- 
patient reformer who leaves the Church to one side, 
that he may get at the real business of helping men. 
We are hunting short cuts to a new social age. 
We are slow to learn our lesson. The life of the 
world is not static, but dynamic. The progress 
of the world is not by laws and institutions. These 
are only the marks and monumients of the real 
forces, and without those forces they are of no 
avail. We are putting our hope to-day in laws 
and charters; but equal laws are of little value 
except as they register the spirit of the people. 
We must socialize the people as well as sociahze 
our institutions. The new social day awaits the ) 



206 A WORKING FAITH 

work of the Church, the clear, strong note that 
shall arise above the clamor of party or the in- 
terest of section, that will speak of justice and 
brotherhood, and that will teach men the reverence 
for right that is learned at the throne of God. 

What is true of society is true of the individual, 
and even more so. He, too, can not live by bread 
alone. I can understand how the man grows im- 
patient -when he sees little children in the miUs, 
and homes that are shut out from light and air 
and food and beauty and pleasure which God meant 
for all His children to have. "The children want 
bread," he says, "and you are giving them a stone. 
Let us talk less about the heaven beyond and 
make a little more of heaven here on earth." There 
is truth in his words. Our first duty is to give 
people a fair chance at life. A fair wage is a nec- 
essary foundation for all social upbuilding. But 
why stop there.? That is only the foundation, 
and a foundation is here to be built upon. "Man 
shall not live by bread alone." It was not an ascetic 
that spoke that. It was one who had pity when 
men were hungry, and healed them when they were 
sick. But Jesus knew that there was hunger deeper 
than that for bread, and questions that reached 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 207 

beyond those of work and wage. Here are a hun- 
dred famdHes of millionaires. The material ques- 
tion is all solved for them, but are there no long- 
ings, no needs.? Is there peace.'* Is there right- 
eousness ? 

The glory of the Church is that she brings a 
message for these needs. Her voice has not always 
been clear; her vision has sometimes paled. The 
Church is human as well as divine. But the great 
words of God and right, of justice and love, of sin 
and pardon, of man's need and God's help, these 
men could always hear. And above all else she has 
brought to men the Christ. Nowhere else have 
men found the answer to these great questions. 
Elsewhere you may find now conscious ignorance, 
now hopeless pessimism, at most a great longing. 
Socrates says: "The oracle calls me the wisest of 
men, but not because I know. I differ from others 
only in this, that while none of us know, I alone 
knoT^' that I do not know." Omar Khayyam speaks 
for multitudes: 

" 'Tis all a chequer-board of Nights and Days 
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: 

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, 
And one by one back in the Closet lays." 2 

» Fitzgerald's Omar Khayy&m, XLIX. 



208 A WORKING FAITH 

And outside of such pessimism we have at most 
the rehgion of a longing as Tennyson has appeal- 
ingly put it: 

"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all. 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 3 

Over against all this the Church stands. It 
brings a great historic revelation. It comes not 
with man's longing, but with God's deed; not our 
cry to Heaven, but Heaven's word to us. God was 
in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. It 
takes the common man and leads him into the pres- 
ence of God. You are more than a cog in a great 
machine, it says. Cod is, and the world means 
good. Here is strength for your weakness; here 
is forgiveness for your sins; here is a life worth 
living in fellowship with God and in service of man, 
and here is hope for the life that lies beyond these 
days. 

But, you say, are there not other voices that 
speak this message, and miay we not read it in the 
Scriptures for ourselves.? Yes, there are other 
voices. But if you will look closely you will see 

» In Memoriam, LV. 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 209 

that they have drawn from the message which the 
Church has handed do\\n. As for the Bible, that 
too is from the Church. There is not a single writ- 
ing in the New Testament that did not come to 
life within the Church. Its Gospels were written 
directly for work of preaching and instruction 
within the Church, as Luke and John point out. 
The great Epistles were letters to Churches or to 
men within the Church. These writings were 
passed from hand to hand in the Church, and from 
one congregation to another. In the Church they 
were treasured and preserved. Here the first small 
collections were formed. Here the wheat was gath- 
ered slowly from the mass of grain and chaff that 
made up early Christian literature. Nor should we 
forget the patient copyists of the monasteries, the 
toilsome work which preserved for us every letter 
of this priceless heritage when so much else was 
whelmed in an age of sem(i-darkness. It was the 
Church that from the very first put these words 
into the speech of the common people. To-day she 
is doing this systematically for the nations of the 
earth in hundreds of languages and dialects. 
When a nation emerges from darkness, she is there 
to spread these writings and lay the foundations of 



210 A WORKING FAITH 

the new life in these great principles. Last year 
she distributed over eleven millions of copies of the 
Bible, in whole or part, in the new Chinese Republic 
alone. No working faith is large enough for us 
that will let us take the truth with selfish hands 
into our little corner \vith no interest in the insti- 
tution from which it came and through which it 
must reach the multitudes of our fellow-men. 

The Church as Fellowship 

The Church means a Fellowship, and claims its 
place as such in our working faith. I believe in 
the communion of the saints. Men sometimes feel 
that they have reached a higher stage when they 
can say: "I prefer to worship by myself and to 
think for myself. The formalism of the cathedral 
and the crudities of the meeting-house are no help 
to me." But that is an imperfect type of religion. 
The story of life as you go from lower to highest 
is the story of constantly closer relations, of deep- 
ening interdependence. The beast may walk alone, 
but no man liveth unto himself. The very man 
who withdraws into himself takes with him only 
what he has gotten from a great historic past, 
which he selfishly refuses to pass on. The finest 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 211 

souls have felt the inspiration that comes from fel- 
lowship as a real need of their life. They craved 
for it, alike that they might share and might re- 
ceive. Christianity is essentially social. John the 
Baptist was a voice in the wilderness; Jesus gath- 
ered a company. There are pathetic suggestions 
of His longing for their fellowship. He takes 
them with Him when He goes to pray. "Ye are 
they," He says toward the end, "that have con- 
tinued with Me in My temptations."* At that 
closing supper He says, "With desire I have de- 
sired to eat this passover with you." ^ And in His 
last terrible struggle we hear Him again, "Could 
ye not watch one little hour with Me.?"^ 

No wonder that these same disciples gathered 
together again after His death. No wonder that 
others were joined to them. The first picture that 
we have of them tells us nothing about creed or 
form of organization. What we see is a faith and 
a fellowship. We feel the pull of that picture 
across the years. "And they continued steadfastly 
in the apostles' teaching and in fellowship, in the 
breaking of bread and the prayers. And they took 
their food with gladness and singleness of heart, 

* Luke 22: 28. » Luke 22: 15. • Matt. 26: 40. 



212 A WORKING FAITH 

praising God."^ The fellowship was inseparable 
from the faith. These men must speak forth their 
faith, must pour out their love, and must win other 
men for that life. The heart of the Christian spirit 
is love, and love means fello\^'ship, and that fellow- 
ship can no more be absent from our worship than 
from any other part. You might disband every 
Church to-morrow and tear down every place of 
worship, before a week was over the little com- 
panies and great would have begun tt) gatliier 
again. 

What the fellowship means for the individual 
life needs hardly to be pointed out. There may be 
strong souls that can live alone. There are not 
many of them, and even these miss the highest 
through their solitude. Who can tell how large 
a part of life is atmosphere? The scientist, the 
artist, the reformer, the philosopher, these men are 
always seeking their own, establishing companies 
and conferences and associations. The Church 
affords such fellowship for men's highest life. 
Strong men find in such association their inspira- 
tion. The vision comes to Isaiah in the temple. 
The common man finds there example, sympathy, 

'Acts 2: 42. 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 213 

reproof, suggestion, that steady pull of social senti- 
ment which is the most powerful influence that we 
know. The worst element in war is the moral de- 
terioration that comes to the soldier, and the cause 
of that deterioration lies mainly here, that men 
have been torn away from those social groups of 
home and Church and community that made for 
them their moral and spiritual ideals. If the 
Church constantly holds up the highest with solemn 
and effective sanction, it saves men also from the 
lower. Every life has its times of moral sag. The 
fixed habit of Church attendance, like other good 
habits, to use a figure of Professor James, is a 
great flywheel that counteracts any unevenness of 
power, that carries us past the moments of weak- 
ness and the times of special moral strain. There 
is a deep suggestiveness in that simiple note in the 
Gospels which speaks of Jesus: "And He entered, 
as His custom was, into the synagogue on the Sab- 
bath day." « 

Look at the meaning of this fellowship for our 
democracy. Demlocracy is not merely a matter of 
constitutional enactment; it is a spirit, and with- 
out that spirit our laws are of no avail. President 

» Luke 4: 16. 



214 A WORKING FAITH 

Roosevelt pointed that out in one of his messages 
to Congress: "In the past the most direful among 
the influences ^hich have brought about the down- 
fall of republics has ever been the growth of the 
class spirit. If such a spirit grows up in this Re-,^ / ^ 
public, it will ultimately prove fatal to us as it has 
proven fatal to every community in which it has 
become dominant."^ No one will deny that this 
tendency is present to-day. In the fear of God 
and the love of men the Church must counteract it. 
And that the Church is doing. Over against all 
spirit of class it sets forth the true democracy. It 
asks no questions as to wealth or standing of the 
men who come to its doors. Whatever may be true 
in single instances, taking the Church as a whole, 
there is no demiocracy like this in all the world. 
Without its doors distinctions reign. Within, men 
are led into the presence of that God before whom 
nothing counts but a pure and penitent heart, and 
who lifts up poor and rich alike to the privilege of 
sons of God. And then it adds to that great truth 
the passion of brotherly love and the deep convic- 
tion of the sacredness of all human life. 

This fellowship means the perpetuation of the 

• Message to Congress, Jan., 1906. 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 215 

Christian faith. Christianity is a historical re- 
ligion. That refers not simply to its origin, but 
to its embodiment. It has lived on not simply as 
ideal and enthusiasm, but in definite forms and 
institutions. And the comprehensive institution 
has been the Church. However imperfectly it has 
been done, here the great message has been pre- 
served, here the life has been lived and passed on, 
and by it the word has been carried from land 
to land. The superior man who does not need the 
Church and passes it by is at heart the selfish man, 
or at least the shortsighted. What has he that 
has not been given to him? And what other source 
of his treasure can compare with the Christian 
Church? She has furnished the ideals and the 
m^ral power upon which that society rests which 
gives him his life. She has passed on the faith 
and the life which he has appropriated for himself. 
Now she calls upon him with right to share the 
task and serve his age and the ages yet to be, to 
help her do this work better than it has ever been 
done before. 

One final aspect of this fellowship must be noted, 
and that is its comprehensiveness. There is an 
unmeasured inspiration in that thought. The fel- 



216 A WORKING FAITH 

lowship to which the Christian Church presents 
a man is not alone the little company in village or 
city which worships together. It shows him the 
whole round world belted with prayer and praise, 
and tells him that he is a part of all of this. Here 
are the thronging worshipers of Korea lately 
emerged from paganism ; here is the swift-growing 
host scattered all through the great Chinese Re- 
public; here are the thatched chapels of the Phil- 
ippines, the huts of Africa, and the great cathe- 
drals of the ancient world. Nor is this all. The 
Church points him back through the ages, and 
bids him sing: 

"For all the saints who from their labors rest. 
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed, 
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest! 
Hallelujah ! Hallelujah ! " lo 

And all the great heroes of the faith and all the 
unnamed multitudes of humble, loyal lives belong 
to that same fellowship, and all belong to Him. 

"One family we dwell in Him, 
One Church above, beneath, 
Though now divided by the stream. 
The narrow stream of death. 

"W. W. How. 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 217 

One army of the living God, 

To His command we bow; 
Part of His host have crossed the flood, 

And part are crossing now." n 

The Church and Worship 

The Church means worship. Here, too, the 
Church meets little response from the spirit of our 
age. The Church says, Come apart and worship 
and meditate. The age replies, We are too busy 
to be idle, we must work and serve. Men may be 
earnest who speak this way, but they are short- 
sighted. Some of them are rather scornful because 
we call such worship a service. "To feed the 
hungry, that is service," they say; "to compass a 
reform or pass a just law ; but to sit and sing and 
pray, where is the service in that.?" Now, that 
is not the sound conviction of common folks. The 
real miarvel is not that so many stay away from 
church, but that week after week and year after 
year, in city and hamlet, in all lands and from all 
classes, in bare chapel and splendid cathedral, the 
worshipers gather together. The popular play 
boasts of its run of a hundred nights. The best 
seller holds its readers for a brief year. There 

" Charles Wesley. 



218 A WORKING FAITH 

must be some vital need that is met by an institu- 
tion that can hold all kinds of men through all 
ages in this constant allegiance. 

The first reason is found in the very nature of 
religion as social. Religion is not a matter of 
opinion to be gathered from books. It is a matter 
of life, and it spreads not from mind to mind, but 
from heart to heart. It is a kindling fire, not a 
cold logic. It needs fellowship in worship. More- 
over, faith once gained is not a gift to be held by 
idle hands. It is the assertion of the invisible and 
the ideal and the heroic. The common experience 
of life is against it ; the world of sight and sense 
that buffets us, the world of hard and selfish strife, 
in which we earn our bread, is not usually a 

"friend to grace, 
To lielp us on to God." 

Nor do the tides of our inner world set that way; 
selfishness and spiritual inertia are native to us. 
A virile, vital faith is an achievement that costs, 
and we need every influence that can help us to 
attain it. It is not enough for us once to have 
set up certain ideals. The heart must turn to 
them again and again. There is an element of 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 219 

time and meditation which the ideal demands. 
Only so does it become effective in our lives. The 
Church is a summons to such meditation. 

And it brings us not only moral ideals, but the 
presence of God. Is He not everywhere.? you say. 
Yes, He is bound to no sacred place, but the limi- 
tations may be with us. Jesus knew men when He 
said, "Where two or three are gathered together." ^^ 
He was thinking not of a condition set by God, 
but of the nature of man. We have all had the 
same experience. We have gone to church at the 
end of a hard week's work, tired, depressed, inert, 
conscious of failure, with no spiritual aliveness, no 
spiritual desire. And then came the organ-strains, 
the reverent and expectant company, the opening 
words of invocation, the hymn of praise in which 
a thousand hearts voiced their desire and thanks- 
giving, and ere we knew it our own spirit had be- 
gun to kindle, and as we left we said. Surely God 
was in this place. Such \^'orship is not a spiritual 
luxury. This spirit of reverence is the heart of 
all that is highest in us. It is not only the heart 
of religion, but the foundation of all order. When 
men cease to worship, then the reverence for all 

"Matt. 18:20. 



220 A WORKING FAITH 

authority and all order in home and State begins 
to pass. 

Let us still claim the name service for the public 
worship of the Church, and let us realize that it 
is not only service of God, but the highest service 
of man. Certainly it is service to feed men and 
clothe them, but the highest service, after all, is 
to lead them into the presence of God, to show 
them the meaning of life, to quicken ideals and 
kindle aspiration, to let them bow in humble con- 
fession, and then to let God Himself send them 
forth to a new life. Jesus was not mistaken in His 
order when He said first to the man who came for 
healing, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." ^^ Nor ;^'as 
the early Church mistaken. We know with what 
pain they met for worship. Many were slaves. 
Their hard day's work left them no time except 
late at night or before the dawn. The days of 
persecution came, and such gatherings meant peril 
of life, so they hid away in catacombs or met out- 
side the city walls. But they knew that the very 
life of the Church hinged upon such chance for 
worship. That early Church, that showed such 
marvelous spiritual power, that changed the ideals 

"Mark 2: 6. 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 221 

and life of an empire, shows us the worshiping con- 
gregation as its central fact from the very begin- 
ning. 

The Church at Work 

We do not know the real Church until we study 
the Church at Work. We might well stop here for 
a summary of our findings thus far. The funda- 
mental fact for our working faith is the conviction 
of a living God who is in His world. His great 
deed and His great coming to men is in Jesus 
Christ. The Scriptures and the Church are monu- 
ments of His movement in the world. The King- 
dom of God is His great end. But the Church is 
not only a monument, it is a means. It is not only 
a part of the Kingdom, it is a great instrument 
for the bringing in of that Kingdom. It is here 
that the Church has often erred. Men have identi- 
fied the Kingdom with the Church, and men have 
made the Church an end instead of a means. Now, 
the Kingdom is greater than the Church, and the 
work of the Kingdom is far wider than the Church. 
Wherever the will of God is being done, there is 
the Kingdom. Wherever there is truth and love 
and righteousness, wherever men are seeking the 



222 A WORKING FAITH 

higher life that is more than meat and drink, there 
is the Spirit of God and there is His Kingdom. 
Wherever business is being carried on justly and 
la\^s are being made in righteousness and men are 
being loved and served, there the Kingdom is be- 
ing advanced in whatever name the work may be 
done. 

The Kingdom is not the Church, but the glory 
of the Church is that it is the great instrument 
for advancing the Kingdom. That does not mean 
that all service is not sacred. It simply means that 
the Church serves at the point where service is 
highest and counts the most. Much of that service 
has already been suggested. The Church brings 
to men the vision of God and forgiveness of sin 
and fellowship with God. It gives them the ideal 
of life, and then supplies the power to achieve that 
ideal. And last of all it inspires them with the 
vision of the Kingdom and sends them out with the 
passion for service. 

The Church of no other age has seen the task 
so clearly or been filled with such a spirit of service 
as to-day. It is learning that what Jesus said of 
the individual life is true of corporate Christianity, 
of the Church itself: "Whosoever would save his 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 223 

life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life 
shall find it."^* It is facing the task of missions 
as never before, pouring the treasures of its wealth 
and the greater treasure of its choicest youth into 
the lands beyond. It has widened its bounds. It 
is turning its ministry toward all life. It claims 
to-day no power for itself over State and industry, 
but it is facing its obligation of service here and 
claiming these and all else for God and man. It 
is holding up its standards of justice and brother- 
hood and reverence for humanity, and trying to 
win for the ^^eakest and the neediest the share of 
the heritage of earth. 

How large that service is we can not realize in 
our land. So much of it in hospital and school 
and legislative hall is being done outside the visible 
Church. We do not realize how truly the Church 
has inspired this. Walk the streets of Pompeii 
and try to picture that ancient life. Here are 
market-place and temple, theater and public bath. 
But you will find trace of no hospital or asylum or 
school, no place whose doors were open to poor 
and helpless and suffering. The Church of the 
mission field faces exactly the same conditions to- 

" Matt. 16: 25. 



224: A WORKING FAITH 

day. And there, until the State becomes Christian 
in part at least, the Church must teach and heal 
and help as she did in these Western lands long 
ago. But here, as there, the work is as truly hers 
as if she controlled once more the agencies which 
she has inspired. Here is a harbor at low ebb, 
stretches of salt marsh, unsightly mud flats, scat- 
tered refuse. We watch the tide come in. It comes 
not only to the pier, where the proud vessels lie at 
anchor. It fills every cove, every little inlet. It 
lifts the great ocean liner, but it bears up tug 
and sail-boat and row-boat as well. The whole life 
of the harbor is lifted by the same great flood 
and at the same time. So the spirit of Christianity 
flowing through the Church lifts slowly but surely 
all the life of humankind. 

The Coming Church 

In all our working faith we are dealing with the 
dynamic, not the static; not with the finished and 
fixed, but with things that are in the making. It 
is so with the Church. We have seen what the 
meaning of the Church is. There is no question 
as to its permanent place. But how it shall fill 
that place is another matter. The Church that 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 

is to be is a matter of supreme concern for us. 
Many to-day are looking to the past for their ideal 
of the Church. They find there two marks which 
they crave for the Church of to-day: authority 
and unity. Once the Church held sway over all 
the life of men. With her rites and ministrations 
she compassed life from cradle to grave. Her voice 
was listened to in all affairs, and princes and kings 
heard from her the final word of authority. To- 
day men pass her by, not merely in matters of busi- 
ness and State, but large numbers of them in affairs 
of faith and moral guidance as well. Once, they 
say, the Church was united. There was one body 
of Christ. To-day her place is taken by a multi- 
tude of separate companies, divided by forms and 
creeds and jealousies of the past, ofttimes warring 
together. And many are bewildered, while others 
are simply indifferent. 

There is much truth in this, and yet a singular 
failure to discern the meaning of Christianity or 
read the lessons of history. The authority of the 
Church of the past, like its unity, was mainly ex- 
ternal. The Church claimed the right to speak, 
and men had to bow*' in submission. That was not 
only in faith and conduct, but in matters of science 

15 



226 A WORKING FAITH 

and State as well. The arm of earthly power was 
used to enforce this authority when necessary. 
Faith was not a conviction of the soul, but a sub- 
mission of the will. Its test was not surrender to 
God, but obedience to an institution. The Church 
alone was held sacred, life outside of it was pro- 
fane. In the Church God moved and spoke, out- 
side of it He was silent, absent. 

Now, history does not move backwards. If that 
is what authority means, the Church has lost it 
forever. Faith means freedom for us, not servi- 
tude. Man has free access to God. And God has 
free access to man, too. He is bound to no channel 
of sacraments, to no lips of priest. We can not 
hedge off one part of the world and call it sacred. 
Religion is personal and ethical. Sacrament and 
institution do not make it. Where there are rev- 
erence and trust, where love and service are, there 
is religion. And all this tells us where the authority 
of the Church of to-morrow will be. Authority 
in religion can only be there where religion is itself. 
It is the life which gives the authority. The 
Church of to-morrow will have power with men just 
so far as it shall have the spirit of Jesus Christ. 
If it shall be loyal to the truth, filled with the spirit 



THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH 227 

of reverence and love, ruled by a passion for justice 
and right and the service of men, then it shall be 
the Church of power, with such an authority as 
it has never had before. 

And this will make the united Church of to- 
morrow for which we are all praying. For the 
unity, like the authority, must come from the na- 
ture of Christianity itself. No authority of pope 
or council can give it, no agreement as to organi- 
zation or creed can bring it about. It must be 
the unity of an inner spirit, a common loyalty to 
Jesus Christ, a deeper devotion to the great task 
of serving men and bringing about His Kingdom. 



CHAPTER VII 
A MAN'S LIFE 



"This main miracle that Thou art Thou, 
With power on Thine own act and on the world." 
Tennyson, De Profundis. 

"Thou seemest human and divine. 

The highest, holiest, manhood. Thou: 

Our wills are ours, we know not how; 

Our wills are ours, to make them Thine/* 

Tennyson, In Memoriam, Prologue. 

"Eternal life is not a theory; it is an art." 
Father Tyerell, Bread and Wine. 

"But speaking truth in love, may grow up in all 
things into Him, who is the head, even Christ." 
"For we are members one of another." 
"We are God's fellow-workers." 

Paul, Eph. 4: 15; 4: 25; 1 Cor. 3: 9. 



Chapter VII 

A MAN'S LIFE 

A T every stage of our discussion thus far we 
'^■^ have noted the practical bearingis of our 
faith. It is a working faith that we have been 
considering, one whose every article has been a 
window looking out upon life. Now we must turn 
to the life itself and sum up the meaning of our 
creed. In the light of our working faith, what is 
a man's life? The answer, of course, can only be 
given in outline. It may be summed up in four 
words: fellowship, saintship, society, stewardship. 

Fei,ix)wship — The Life with God 

There are other words than fellowship to ex- 
press our life with God : love, reverence, obedience, 
service. There is none that is so rich and true as 
this. The real wealth of any life consists in its 
personal relations. It is not possession or knowl- 
edge or po\^er that makes us rich; it is our re- 
lations with personal beings. There is the love 
231 



232 A WORKING FAITH 

within the home, the fellowship with friends, the 
relations of community and nation, and the ideal 
relation with saint and seer and poet who come 
to us in the record of their words or the story of 
their lives. All else in life is its housing; this is 
its heart. And the relation which completes all 
the rest is the fello^^ship with God. 

The thought of that fellowship comes to us in 
the Old Testamient in some of the most beautiful 
passages of all literature. It is a fellowship of 
mercy and condescension on God's side. "In all 
their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of 
His presence saved them: in His love and in His 
pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and 
carried them all the days of old."^ "For thus 
saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eter- 
nity, whose name is Holy : I dwell in the high and 
holy place, with him also that is of a contrite 
and humble spirit."^ The prophets saw in such 
fellowship an essential part of religion. Micah's 
great definition of religion is characteristic: "To 
do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly 
with thy God."^ They insisted upon righteousness, 
but they intended no bald religion of deeds as some 

> Isa. 63: 9. « Isa. 57: 15. » Mioah 6: 8. 



A MAN'S LIFE 233 

interpret them to-day. Back of this righteousness 
was a great fellowship of fear and love and trust 
in God. The Twenty-third Psalm is the most 
beautiful expression of that fellowship in the Old 
Testament, and its simple words have voiced the 
faith of men in all the days since then. 

It was this great truth that Jesus brought out 
with unerring touch. Religion in His day, as so 
often since, was hidden beneath all manner of 
debris, elaborate rituals and formularies, and end- 
less rules of conduct. All these He brushed aside. 
The eternal God is your Father, He taught. Even 
the hairs of your head are knoTvn to Him. He 
loves you, least and greatest. When you pray, 
say, "Our Father." There are other things that 
religion needs in order to assert itself in the world. 
It must live on in a community; it must express 
itself in form of organization and worship ; it must 
shape its faith in word of doctrine. But the real 
fount of religion is in none of these. It is in the 
soul bowed before God in humility, looking up to 
Him in simple confidence, and saying, "Abba, Fa- 
ther."* This is the final meaning for our own 
life of the study of God in His world with which we 

«Mk. 14:86. 



234 A WORKING FAITH 

began. The great Power is a Presence, and the 
Presence is a Person, and the Person is the God 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here the 
simlplest faith and need of man join themselves to 
the highest insight into the meaning of this world 
and the power by which it is ruled. 

But before we go farther with this thought of 
fellowship we must meet a problem that arises. 
Fellowship with God, Jesus taught, means likeness 
to Him in spirit. To be children of our Father, 
Jesus said, meant far more than to take from a 
good-natured God the gifts of health and bread 
and happiness. It meant to be merciful as our 
Father is merciful. Fello\^ship means righteous- 
ness. That is the gulf that opens before us. How 
can we ever meet such a demand as that.f* The 
gulf had been great enough before Jesus' time. 
The prophets had burned their message into the 
heart of all earnest men, such as the Pharisee Saul : 
Men must be righteous to have fellowship with 
God. Jesus deepened that thought. He made the 
demand more severe. Righteousness is the inner 
spirit; no outer deed can satisfy. Righteousness 
means the whole life; no part or section will do, 
no miere tithe of income, no one holy day in seven. 



A MAN'S LIFE 235 

This Is the great gulf, and jet this is the gulf 
that Jesus bridged. This is the paradox of faith, 
but it is its very heart as well. Jesus solved it, 
not by logic, but by a message of life. He abated 
not one jot from His great demand of righteous- 
ness, and yet He was always bringing not saints 
but sinners into the fellow ship of God. His answer 
was simply this: God demands the highest, and 
gives what He demands. He asks that we shall 
be children like Him in inner spirit, and then He 
takes us into fellowship with Himself, that He 
may give that spirit to us. Long ago one of the 
Church fathers said, "Command what Thou wilt, 
and give what Thou commandest." That is the 
truth. We can understand it better if we take 
Jesus' analogy of father and son. What does the 
father crave for his son.'^ Not to feed him and 
clothe him. That much he will db for a servant. 
He wants a boy who will grow up into his spirit, 
his ideals, and life. Only so will he be the son. 
But the father does not say. First become like m,e, 
and then I will take you into fellowship with me. 
He takes the boy into fellowship in order that the 
boy may become a true son. Only one condition 
is necessary, and that lies in the very nature of 



236 A WORKING FAITH 

the case. The son must desire the fellowship, and 
desire it so that he shall turn day by day from 
the things that stand in the way and give himself 
to the life with his father. 

That is the great Christian doctrine of repent- 
ance and forgiveness. Fellowship is mutual. It 
is true we can not give to God as He to us. But 
He can not give to us except as we give the open 
heart to Him. That is why Jesus says so much of 
the spirit of the child. That is why He is more 
hopeful of the penitent publican than of the satis- 
fied churchman praying in the temple. God gives 
His fellowship to those who with earnest desire and 
surrender of life turn to Him. And He receives 
us, not to make light of our sin or to lessen His 
demand, but in order that He may overcome that 
sin by forgiving it and that we m!ay realize that 
demand through our life with Him. It was asked 
of Seneca once why he dined with his slaves. "I 
dine with some of them," he responded, "because 
they are worthy of it, with others that I may make 
them worthy." Of that last gift of life, the fel- 
lowship with God, we are none of us worthy. It 
is the most holy who see this most clearly, for their 
higher life gives them a clearer vision of that glory 



A MAN'S LIFE 237 

of God of which we men come short. But that 
^as Jesus' great deed, at once to deepen in men 
the sense of their sin and to give them the courage 
to trust in the mercy of God and to seek His fel- 
lowship. 

This conviction is expressed in Christian thought 
by the conception of the Holy Spirit. We mean 
by that doctrine more than the idea of the imma- 
nence of God, His presence sustaining all things. 
We mean that He dwells as a personal and loving 
fellowship in the hearts of men, informing their 
spirits by His Spirit, transforming their life by 
His friendship. 

To discuss what this fellowship means on the 
human side, would lead us far beyond our limits. 
And yet its nature is simple enough if we will 
follow the suggestion of Jesus. For Him the fel- 
lowship meant to lead the life of a son with His 
Father. That life which He realized for Himself 
He set forth for His followers alike in His example 
and His teaching. The world had never known 
what such Sonship meant until it looked upon His 
life. It means first of all, as we have seen, the 
humble spirit and the open, eager heart. That 
belongs not only at the beginning, but at every 



238 A WORKING FAITH 

stage of the Christian life. Luther meant this 
when he called repentance a life-task. He did 
not mean a mere bewailing of past sin, but an ever- 
renewed turning of the eager soul to God. The 
spirit of trust comes next. Anxiety in the judg- 
ment of Jesus is not a weakness, but a sin. "Your 
Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all 
these things." And third, with the trust must 
go reverence and fear. Our trust means little if 
we have not a God of power. And what does our 
aspiration mean except there be a God of holiness 
to whom it turns? It is the fear of God that sets 
men free from other fears, and without the rever- 
ence that bows us down there is no lifting up of 
life. Such sonship means, in the fourth place, 
obedience, an absolute surrender. No one ever 
made this demand so sweeping as Jesus. Hate 
father and mother. He said. Pluck out the right 
eye, cut off the right hand. How could He ask 
this.? Jesus demanded the great surrender because 
He saw the great gift. This life with God was 
the great treasure, the priceless pearl for which 
men might well give all. And He showed another 
reason. God was giving men not simply bread, 
but Himself, His own love. The answer to such 



A MAN'S LIFE 239 

a gift could be nothing less than a mean's own life, 
his inmost affection and his very will. Such obe- 
dience is not mere submission, but the glad passion 
of a life that has found its real end. It is not 
as a subject that obeys, but as the son who shares 
his father^s great purposes and takes them as the 
goal of his life. 

Prayer is the expression of this fellowship with 
God. Have we the right to pray? What may 
we expect from prayer? If we are right so far, 
if man may have real fellowship with God, then 
prayer itself is as inevitable as speech is between 
friends. As to what we may expect from prayer, 
we need only recall the foundations upon which we 
have been building. God is not apart from the 
world, but in the world and in all its life. Nature 
and natural laws are but the thoughts of God, the 
machinery by which He is working out His pur- 
poses. Natural order is God's instrument, not 
something by which He has tied His hands. It is 
the personal, not the mechanical, that is the su- 
preme fact of the world and its final power. How 
God answers man's prayer is not our concern. It 
is not done by reaching into the world from with- 
out. He is in the world, and the world has no life 



240 A WORKING FAITH 

or being apart fromi Him. Can He not work 
through that which is His own? If we earthly 
fathers, in this world of law and order, can hear 
our children's plea and give them good gifts, how 
much more shall He not be able to give good gifts 
to those that ask Him? There is only one ^ay in 
which men may show that such praying is "scien- 
tifically" impossible, and that is by proving that 
there is nothing real except the world of matter and 
motion, that there is no personal or spiritual in our 
world, and that there can be none above our world. 
But this is impossible from the nature of the case, 
and, on the other hand, we have seen the compelling 
reasons for holding not only that the spiritual is 
real, but that it is supreme. 

More important is it that we shall understand 
the nature of prayer. The danger in such dis- 
cussion as the above is that men will think of 
prayer simply as asking and getting. The real 
meaning of prayer is seen as the expression of that 
fellowship which we have just considered. As such 
it is not an incident in religion, but its very heart. 
It is not something which God merely tolerates, 
as the king does his subjects who come with their 
petitions. The prayer of men is His great desire. 



A MAN'S LIFE 241 

For such fellowship He made the worlds. But 
this ideal of fellowship determines what our pray- 
ing should be. Shall we ask God for what we 
need? Yes. May we ask Him for material gifts? 
Yes. To the true father everything is of interest 
that concerns his child. But if our asking is to be 
real praying, real fellowship, then two elements 
must be present: first, the spirit of utter trust, so 
that our deepest joy will be not in the gift that 
may come, but in the confidence with which we 
leave all our life with Him ; second, the spirit of 
entire surrender, not grudging, but glad, that 
makes His will our final desire beyond all other 
wishes. There is a great deal of misleading talk 
about faith in prayer. It is not faith in prayer 
that we need, but faith in God. Faith in prayer 
is pagan. Its question is : What will my prayer 
get for me? It is like the Thibetan's trust in his 
prayer-wheel, like the pagan confidence in magic 
rite or sacrifice to persuade an unwilling god. Too 
much of our talk about prayer is like calculating 
what somle friendship might yield us. For real 
faith in God prayer comes as simply and inevitably 
as the very life of love and trust out of which it 
springs. Such prayer is as wide as life itself, for 
16 



242 A WORKING FAITH 

all Christian life must find expression in it. Here 
is reverent awe that bows in worship, and joyous 
praise that remembers all its blessings, humble con- 
trition that brings its confession, the cry that calls 
for help, the Christlike plea for other men, the 
prayer for the coming of the Kingdom which is not 
so much petition as it is a devotion of ourselves to 
God's purpose, and that simple desire for God 
which is like the heart of a child that loves his 
father's presence beyond his father's gifts. 

Such prayer will not be the same for all. Be- 
cause it is life, it can not be learned by rule. No 
one has the right to lay down the method by which 
another should pray. And yet just as life is an art, 
so there is an art of prayer. It is right to ask, 
as they of old did, "Teach us to pray." We may 
learn to pray. The psalms will help us. The 
lives of men who prayed will help us, such a chap- 
ter as that which shows us Livingstone, the un- 
resting man of action, ending his life on his knees 
in that mid-African hut. And widely different 
from either, we can get help from such a little 
book as that of Brother Lawrence, "The Practice 
of the Presence of God." But most of all it needs 
what friendship always demands, time and thought 
and desire. 



A MAN'S LIFE 243 

Saintship — The Making of a Man 

Saintship expresses the second aspect of life 
which we take from our working faith. It is an 
old-fashioned phrase, and it might be better to 
take some word like character, that were less liable 
to misunderstanding. Rightly understood, how- 
ever, it has a richness and an inwardness which 
other words do not possess. We do not, of course, 
have in mind the traditional saint, with cell and 
halo and dreams of another world. What we mean 
is this : the first great end of our life is the making 
of a man, and our fellowship with God is the great 
means to that end. Life is not simply a proba- 
tion to be passed or a work to be done. It means 
growing a soul. Saintship in the New Testament 
means two things. It includes, first, a belonging 
to God. The saint is the devoted man, the loyal 
mian, the man who has found the high meaning of 
life and has given himself to it. It means, second, 
not simply the surrender to an ideal, but its achieve- 
ment. It means not simply the man who belongs 
to God in this fellowship, but the man who is 
living after the spirit of that fellowship and is 
being made over by it. The word has suffered in 
common use. The mediaeval Church limited it to 



244 A WORKING FAITH 

the few and gave it an other-worldly flavor. The 
New Testament uses it for every man who belongs 
to Jesus Christ. It is worth our while to restore 
the word to its larger use. And it expresses for 
us the two elements of our moral problem that we 
wish to consider: a mlan's right attitude and his 
moral transformation. 

Let us turn to the second element first. Our real 
problem is not that of the ideal, but of the power 
of achievement. So fine and masterful a spirit as 
Huxley could declare, that if any beneficent being 
should promise him that he should never go wrong 
on condition that he would submit to being wound 
up like a clock, he would close with the offer at 
once. What earnest man has not felt the problem ? 
The ideal lays hold of us. We would be such a 
man as that. But there is a deep gulf between 
that ideal and the real man that we are. "The 
good which I would, I do not: but the evil which 
I would not, that I practice."^ 

The answer to this we have already touched 
upon. It is given to us in the fellowship which God 
offers to us. What we need to see clearly here is 
this: the fellowship of God is not only a gracious 

•Rom. 7: 19. 



A MAN'S LIFE 245 

gift, it is the supreme power for making men. Life 
alone can mold life. We know whiat intinnate 
human fellowship means, the influence of father, 
mother, brother, wife, friend, hero. Such a rela- 
tion will set ideals and mold ambitions, will enter 
a man's life and unseal the fountains of its deep, 
will strengthen men by the trust it imposes, or by 
some noble passion kindled in them will stir them 
to a whole life of achievement. When such a fel- 
lowship touches the moral ideals and passions, it 
becomes the greatest transforming power known. 
But here is the highest life, the life of God, brought 
to bear upon our own. Here is an intimacy of fel- 
lowship that no other relation can reach. Here 
is a friend that lays claim to the very citadel of 
our soul. Life in that fellowship means a daily 
aspiration and a daily surrender to the highest that 
man can conceive. The strongest motives of grati- 
tude and affection are joined to a trust that grows 
stronger with the experiences that justify it. Mo- 
rality, weak when it is a mere effort, gains here the 
strength of a passion. We sum it up and com- 
plete it by saying in simple religious speech: God 
gives His Spirit to us as our life, and thus makes 
us His children. 



S46 A WORKING FAITH 

It is easy to cry out at all this as mystical and 
impossible and inconceivable. It is inconceivable 
if by that you mean that we can not picture it. 
But it is just as hard to understand how friend 
and friend on earth may have commerce together 
and mold each other. It is easy to object; but 
what has been the actual result of this fellowship? 
Speaking soberly, thinking of men and of nations, 
we can say nothing less than this: Here is the su- 
preme moral force of history; this is the power 
that has transformed the world. The story is a 
long one. It might begin with the little company 
of Galilean peasants who became the teachers of 
the world. It might end \vith the tale of the last 
besotted wretch made over into manhood, of the 
fruitage of ten thousand years of paganism in some 
Fiji isle lifted to Christian level in a generation, 
or better still, the picture of just one out of myri- 
ads of Christian homes with its reverence and peace 
and its fellowship of joyous love informed by the 
spirit of Jesus Christ. 

This is one side of the making of the man, the 
side of grace, of mercy, of God's forgiveness, of 
His down-reaching. God receives men into the fel- 
lowship of sons in order that He may make them 



A MAN'S LIFE 247 

over Into true sons of His spirit. The moral de- 
mand of this fellowship makes the other side. That 
moral demand unfortunately has often been 
slighted, and the fellowship itself has been by so 
much cheapened. We have seen that the fellow- 
ship is God's gracious gift through the forgiveness 
of men. But too often the tremendous moral mean- 
ing of forgiveness has been overlooked. God's for- 
giveness Is the freest of gifts and the costliest, and 
it costs man as well as God. At the very gate of 
forgiveness by which we enter into fellowship there 
stands the moral demand. God gives Himself; He 
asks for the man in return. Affection, obedience, 
confidence, the last thought and motive and de- 
sire — all these He requires. How searchingly, even 
sternly, Jesus put the demand. The real fellow- 
ship with God is something inner and intimate and 
personal. It can come only as the life Is open to 
Him. And the demand comes daily, not simply at 
the beginning. The very gift Itself Is a demand. 
The life He gives us Is one that we possess only in 
the living. The same life is both gift and task: 
"If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also 
walk."« 

« Gal. 5:25. 



248 A WORKING FAITH 

Society — The Life with Man 

Society is the third \^ord that we use to suggest 
the meaning of life. The social point of view has 
appeared in every chapter of our discussion, and 
so, despite its importance, may be treated the more 
briefly here. We may consider it under four words. 
Man is social in his nature, in his training, in his 
task, and in his end. 

Man's nature is social. Our life comes from God, 
but it is given to us in the great stream of human 
existence. The story of the whole race is in the 
heredity of each single life. The history of ages 
of prayer and thought and toil is in the environ- 
ment that insensibly but surely molds each one of 
us. Man's training is social. The qualities that 
Jesus emphasized are social qualities, truth, pa- 
tience, kindliness, good-will, love. These are not 
the virtues of the cloister, and we gain them only 
in the fellowship with men. Man's task is social. 
Jesus, like the prophets, found man's service of God 
not in ceremonial performance, but in the service 
of men. The great task is to build up all the re- 
lations of men in love and justice, and to set up a 
Kingdom of righteousness in all the earth. Man's 
end is social. God's purpose for the race is not 



A MAN'S LIFE 249 

to gather out a company of single souls from the 
wreck of the years, but to establish a new society, 
a fello\^'ship of mutual love, a Kingdom of right- 
eousness. 

Stewardship — ^Life as Trust and Task 

The word stewardship suggests the final mean- 
ing of life in the light of our working faith. All 
the elements in this conception of our life, as we 
have seen, flow from the thought of God and His 
world. Because God is person, and loving person, 
the Christian life is fellowship with Him. Because 
this God is holy. His fellowship demands holiness 
from men and works holiness in men; that is the 
question of character, of saintship. Because 
human life is one and the single soul lives only as 
part of the great hunnan current, therefore our 
life is social in nature and demand and duty. 

In the same way our thought of life as a steward- 
ship rests upon our conception of the way in which 
God is carrying out His plan with the world. It 
is true that there has not always been agreement 
on this in Christian thought. In other days men 
laid the stress upon the single soul and the prepa- 
ration for the next world. Life then became simply 



250 A WORKING FAITH 

a probation, this world and its affairs of little 
consequence ; man's chief business was to keep away 
from evil, and his chief concern to make sure of 
heaven. If our conception of life is very different 
from this, it is in part because we have a very 
different idea as to God's plan and method in His 
world. We do not look upon the world as a work 
of God once finished, then marred by sin, out of 
which now a remnant is to be saved. First of all, 
it is a T^'orld in the making. Second, as we have 
seen, in this world-making God is working from 
within ; not as an external force, but as an indwell- 
ing and moving spirit is He shaping His world. 
Third, this indwelling spirit is not a mere atmos- 
phere, nor a stream of tendency, nor a vague force. 
The spirit is Person, a person calling other persons 
into fellowship with Himself, shaping their lives 
and using them in His great ends. And finally, 
the end of the T^ork is a new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousnes, the Kingdom of God. 

If this be a true vision of God and His world, 
then life gains a new meaning and a new perspec- 
tive. We are not spectators in the world, nor 
mere servants, nor simple beneficiaries. We are 
friends who know what our Lord is doing. We 



A MAN'S LIFE 251 

have been honored with vision and with a task. 
Life is a trust, a partnership, or, in Jesus' phrase, 
a stewardship. Man becomes a co-worker with 
God, a co-regent in the world. And the world itself 
and our every life become charged with eternal 
meaning. 

It will be seen at once that this conception de- 
termines the judgment that our working faith is 
to pass upon the world. According to Jesus there 
are three attitudes that a man may take in relation 
to the world. He may fear it or love it or use it. 
The fear of the world is one of the great sins 
against which Jesus solemnly warns. Its root is 
the spirit of paganism. There is no place for 
fear in faith, for we are in the Father's house. 
The world is not the dominion of the devil, which 
men are to flee or of which they are to be afraid. 
Its beauty is from His hand ; He gave color to the 
lily. Its harvests are His gift ; He makes the rain 
to fall. Like the fear of the world, so the love of 
the world was a sin with Jesus, and nowhere are 
His warnings so stern as here. It is the sin of men 
who seize the gift and forget the Giver, to whom 
the good becomes evil because it keeps them from 
the highest good. Above all, such men fail to 



252 A WORKING FAITH 

see the spiritual meaning of material things, that 
beauty and health and wealth and life are only the 
tools for higher ends. That is the higher meaning 
which our faith gives to the world: it is the place 
ordered of God for the molding of men and for 
the establishing of a fellowship of righteousness 
and love. 

Of the many practical questions that press upon 
us here and that concern deeply our daily life, 
only a few can be touched. Here is the question 
of pleasure and comfort, the whole aspect of phys- 
ical life and enjoyment. We see at once the two 
extremes that we m(ust shun. This world is not 
something that is to be feared and fled. We will 
rather take the beauty and the joy of life as good 
gifts of God. Asceticism is not our rule of life. 
Neither is self-indulgence, however, and that is our 
greater peril to-day. Shall we steer, then, a middle 
course, taking just so much of pleasure as to avoid 
excess and yet yield us the greatest good? This 
maxim, too, fails of the Christian standpoint. The 
world of health and wealth and beauty are here for 
the giving of life and the making of men: that is 
our principle. There is nothing narrow, however, 
in such a principle, as we can readily see by a few 



A MAN'S LIFE 253 

applications. Consider the question of recreation. 
Too often serious men have frowned upon pleasure, 
looking upon it at most as a concession to human 
weakness, especially in youth. Wise men know to- 
day that play is a vital part of the education of 
childhood, an instinct that God hias implanted. 
The child that is cheated of its birthright of play 
is father to the ambitionless, spiritless, inefficient 
man. The mingling of youth of opposite sexes is 
a part of this same plan of education. The big 
city of to-day sins against God and its youth by 
turning over this God-given instinct of social rec- 
reation to be exploited by greed in the commercial- 
ized places of pleasure. 

It is the same way with the world of work and 
business and wealth. They are all schools for the 
development of life, or may be made such. So- 
briety, industry, self-restraint, loyalty, the spirit 
of co-operation, these and other fine qualities come 
to the man who does well his work in the world of 
labor and business. Or take a man's physical life. 
The body is not the prison house of the soul, nor 
the dangerous seductress leading us astray by her 
pleasures and passions. Life is one, and the finest 
health of soul comes usually with the health of 



254 A WORKING FAITH 

body, while the body itself becomes not master of 
pleasure but minister in service. 

While all this is true, there is another aspect 
which needs to be enforced. It is indeed our fun- 
damental principle. We have taken pleasure and 
friendship and the body with its joy of health and 
its passions and business and possessions, and have 
declared that all of these are good. Now let us 
add, they are good only as they minister to life, 
and to life at its highest. We know how easily 
every one of these may be perverted. Pleasure 
may become a minister of sensuality and cruelty. 
Business may become a monster of oppression. 
And the danger does not lie in what is openly evil. 
The business may be honest, only its crowding 
cares may leave no room for beauty and truth and 
friends and God. The pleasure may be pure, but 
it may become the single passion which leaves life 
shallow and selfish and unsatisfied. What does our 
principle of stewardship mean here.^^ It means that 
all these goods are a trust, are so much of the 
capital of our life. We are to use and to rule so 
that life shall come out of it. Out of the friends 
and the play and the toil and the wealth should 
come in the end the stronger hand, the kindlier 



A MAN'S LIFE 255 

heart, the richer mind, the pure thought, the effi- 
cient life, the soul that is full of good-will and 
peace, for which the vision of high things is clearer 
and the purpose to attain more strong. All this 
is just one step in which we work with God in His 
great plan of spiritualizing this world and of 
making men. 

So far we have discussed this principle of stew- 
ardship only as applied to our own individual life. 
It is the social application that gives its largest 
meaning. We are workers together in the world's 
life, not only in our own. All that we have : health, 
skill of hand, gift of voice, wealth, social position, 
is ours not in fee simple, but in trust. There is 
only one absolute owner; that is God. We are ad- 
ministering a portion of His world. The final 
test of life is loyalty in that ministry: Are we 
working out His ends? It is not a question of 
tithing an income, or keeping a day holy. That 
is legalism, the ethics of the servant. The servant 
does his task and is done. The son belongs to his 
father all the time and in all his life. 

It is easy to take the principle when put in gen- 
eral terms. It will cut quick enough and deep 
enough if we once seriously apply it. Look at it 



256 A WORKING FAITH 

in relation to our industrial life of to-day. No 
age has ever seen more generous men of \^'ealtli 
than this day. We are living in the age of philan- 
thropy. But philanthropy is not stewardship. 
Philanthropy has to do with the spending of 
money. Stewardship includes the method of its 
making as well. It is not enough to look at dona- 
tions to universities and libraries. Where did the 
money come from? Were competitors crushed by 
unfair means .^^ Did the millions from^ steel mean 
twelve hours a day and seven days in the week from 
thousands of laborers.? Then that is not a good 
stewardship in sight of God and man, however 
many libraries and peace palaces may arise. If 
God were really the chief partner in the business, 
I think He would care more for men. 

Or suppose we apply the principle to our in- 
dustrial disputes. What shall we say to the manu- 
facturer or mine owner who declares that his busi- 
ness is his own, that he will brook no interference, 
that his workmen have no right to say anything 
as to how the business shall be conducted, that they 
have the right to work or to quit, but not to or- 
ganize and demand that he shall treat T\ith them 
as a whole? To such a man, from the point of 



A MAN'S LIFE 257 

our faith, we shall simply say: No title to prop- 
erty is absolute. What you have belongs to God. 
He is giving it to you to hold and use for men. 
The question is not of your right, but your duty. 
Does your direction of this business make for jus- 
tice and peace and general welfare.? 

The principle must be applied to the spending 
of money. No man has a right to spend his in- 
come on himself and his family as a mere matter 
of course. That income, like the business that 
made it, belongs to God. Our sole question is. 
How shall I spend it so as to further what is good, 
to advance that for which God cares .f^ We need, 
first of all in this day, a new appraisal of the mean- 
ing of money. It is a root of all evil only when 
planted the wrong way, and that wrong way is 
either the selfish hoarding or the selfish spending. 
Money itself is not evil. It is only so much 
power; its moral quality waits to be determined. 
It is so much stored up personality, so much of 
brawn and brain and tears and sweat, so much 
even of human blood. The supreme question is. 
On which side of the eternal conflict shall the power 
be ranged, and how wisely shall it be employed? 
Our own day is giving us clear examples of what 

17 



258 A WORKING FAITH 

this power may do. There are individual men 
whose fortune is large enough to stamp out the 
scourge of tuberculosis in New York. That money 
would mean information, education, better laws 
through public enlightenment, disease-breeding 
houses torn down, better homes erected, hospitals 
and sanatoria, and the service of hundreds of sci- 
entists and physicians and visiting nurses set free 
by such support for the great task. Education, 
health, the work of the Church on the foreign field, 
the work of the Church at home, all give illustra- 
tions of what wisely-placed wealth can do. There 
are many things that wealth can not buy, we say, 
and that is true. But in our world of to-day there 
are thousands of splendid, capable lives waiting to 
enlist in any service if men of wealth will meet their 
charges and set them free for the task. 

We call this the day of philanthropy, and yet 
men have only just begun to see the stewardship 
of wealth. There are rich men with large gifts. 
So far, however, we have been looking at the size 
of their gifts. The fairer test would be to ask 
how much they have retained for themselves. And 
what fair test of stewardship will excuse the man 
who leaves his thousands or his millions to children. 



A MAN'S LIFE 



beyond all real need of theirs, and forgets the 
needs of the Kingdom and the claims of countless 
fellow-men who are his brothers. Some time we 
shall see that such a deed is as plain a denial of 
God as any atheist creed. 

More important still is it that the rank and file 
of men of modest means shall apply this principle 
in their lives. It should be done in practical 
fashion, for this is business which demands not 
less good sense and order because it is the world's 
greatest business. To set aside some fair portion 
of a man's income, to study where it may best be 
invested in the Kingdom of God, to let prayer and 
knowledge and gift go together, this is the stew- 
ardship of giving. And the stewardship of busi- 
ness is just as needful for the common man, for 
it is not some few men of power upon whom justice 
and peace and good-will wait in the world, but in 
the main just upon you and me and our neighbor. 
And you and he and I need for our lesser task 
in life the ennoblement and inspiration that come 
when we realize that the least of honest work may 
mean a real partnership in the eternal plans of God. 

There is one other sphere of stewardship to 
which we must apply our principle, and that is the 



.260 A WORKING FAITH 

personal life. The investment of our own life is 
what finally determines the character of our stew- 
ardship. That is the supreme treasure that God 
has put into our hands to use. No other gift will 
compensate if we hold this back. Nor is there any 
other need in God's Kingdom so urgent as this need 
of the investment of life. It is the same need that 
fronts us wherever we turn. Our public life suffers 
to-day not from the strength of the gang, but from 
the indifference of the respectable citizen. A city 
official recently upon the same day took an inde- 
pendent stand relative to two public questions. One 
concerned telephone rates, and the next morning's 
mail brought him twenty letters of approval. The 
other was in opposition to the liquor interests, but 
it brought forth not one letter from the forces of 
righteousness. Our public life needs more than a 
few leaders plus an occasional spasm of reform on 
the part of the masses. It demands some invest- 
ment of our life, of thought and time and interest. 
It is so in matters of moral reform. Evil is 
cowardly. The courage of a few men will often 
put a host of evil forces to flight. But the men 
are wanting, and the evil stands. 

The question of vocation comes in here for the 



A MAN'S LIFE 261 

young man and woman. Where shall I invest my 
life? Only the great principles can be touched 
upon here. First, it is the spirit that counts, and 
all true service is sacred. There is no one calling 
that is holy. 

"Who sweeps a room as by Thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine." 

Second, the common callings are holy only when 
followed in the uncommon way. The talk of the 
sacredness of all life too often means that we drag 
everything down to the level of the common in- 
stead of lifting up the rest to the plane of the 
highest. Business and law may be made a holy 
calling, but it takes more spiritual power than 
most men seem to possess. Third, there is a grow- 
ing field of callings in which men are set free for 
more direct service. It is not that the spirit is 
different here from what it should be in other call- 
ings, but it is possible in these to bring one's life 
to bear more directly upon the needs of men than 
is usually the case in other vocations. Various 
forms of social service have notably enlarged this 
field of late years. In this field the ministry of the 
gospel still leads. Not that it is unique as a "holy" 



262 A WORKING FAITH 

calling, but it gives opportunities of leadership 
as no other one field; it moves upon men with the 
most powerful appeal ; it is the supreme teacher of 
ideals for men and communities through the gospel 
which it brings; and it bears to men the highest 
good in answer to the deepest need. The larger 
and more vital conception of religion which we 
have been considering will make the ministry more 
important to-morrow than in any day of the past. 
Finally, there is the question of location as in- 
separable from that of vocation. It is not only the 
deed that counts, but the time and the place. Liv- 
ingstone in England might have been simply a 
good physician like ten thousand others. Living- 
stone in Africa wrote a chapter of history for God's 
Kingdom. That is the great appeal of the foreign 
mission field, especially in this day when great 
peoples like the Japanese and Chinese, the Koreans 
and the Indians, are emerging from age-long stag- 
nation. To-day their plastic life is waiting new 
ideals and forces to mold it. To-morrow it will 
have taken its bent for long years of development. 
What is true in the history of these nations is 
largely true of the world of our day as a whole. 
Men smile at the common-place remark that we are 



A MAN'S LIFE 263 

living in a crucial age. It seems like a bit of de- 
lusion that comes to each generation. The de- 
lusion, in fact, lies on the other side: this age does 
not realize what history it is making. In creed, 
in Church, in State, in industry, in the whole social 
organization we are moving fromi an old epoch 
into a new. The progress is unequal. We do not 
know how long its day will be. We can not tell 
how wise will be the change, for movement does not 
always mean advance. But so much we may see, 
that it is a day in which men may thank God for 
the chance to live and work. From the remote 
home of her hard Siberian exile, old but dauntless, 
Madame Breshkovsky wrote not long ago to an 
American friend : "Life is growing more and more 
interesting. I wish to witness it." To witness it 
and to play bravely and truly our part in this 
great day of God, that ambition should belong 
to our working faith. 



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